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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e03afc3 | This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them. | Alice Munro | ||
| 7a51ee8 | Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize. | Alice Munro | ||
| eb0444c | What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old. It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on some.. | marriage mother wife | Alice Munro | |
| 2260dfa | Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently. | chaddeleys-and-flemings connection | Alice Munro | |
| f7974f8 | I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and then to my surprise--for I am surprised, even though I know the p.. | Alice Munro | ||
| 820280f | The thing is to be happy," he said. "No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears." | Alice Munro | ||
| ab94a65 | It was autumn, the springtime of death. | Tom Robbins | ||
| cb829ee | and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren't funny. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 0d9f3c3 | Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with Isaac for the blessing, with Laban for the blessing, and in each case he eventually prevailed. He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 706adcf | i couldn't speak the language of his feelings | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 00fcc19 | Not to have a choice is also a choice. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f9bee54 | I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 324e1ac | I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| ac06613 | he was leaving me. I wondered if I should stop him. If I should wrestle him to the ground and force him to love me. I wanted to hold his shoulders down and shout into his face. | leaving love | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| a1304c0 | I wasn't trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn't matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 29cd049 | What does it remember like? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| d57ae25 | We need much bigger pockets I thought as I lay in my bed counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets pockets big enough for our families and our friends and even the people who aren't on our lists people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for borough and for cities a pocket that could hold the universe. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| df739ff | It's better to lose than to never have had. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| d229f73 | Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 8ad7ef9 | But the point isn't that I want to know everything about you. It's that I don't want anything about you withheld. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 1a6725c | Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of... | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 292fa3a | I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back? " | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| b61d76d | Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything .. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e657b9a | It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f321ec5 | He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 2e0e5b4 | Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 101e6b4 | I made up my mind that nothing,, nothing was going to stop me Not even me. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 2379b08 | Solutions like, We solve the problems? Or solutions like, We dissolve fuckers in acid? | Denis Johnson | ||
| e3172ec | Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. but I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people.. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 3aec10e | So here I am, upside down in a woman. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 41ce90a | Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option. | option | Ian McEwan | |
| 6341d65 | Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, [Briony] learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended. | body philosophy truth | Ian McEwan | |
| 436e06e | The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 8da56bc | It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning, | Ian McEwan | ||
| 5e1666a | This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 674d087 | He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 929d47c | She was like a bride-to-be who begins to feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches, and dares not speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on her behalf the happiness and convenience of so many good people would be put at risk. | Ian McEwan | ||
| d695735 | I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars! | fate | Ian McEwan | |
| 789382d | Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love. | Franz Kafka | ||
| a2e2fb9 | Judgement does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgement. | Franz Kafka | ||
| 4fbd95d | There am I. I cannot leave. I have nothing to complain about. I do not suffer excessively, for I do not suffer consistently, it does not pile up, at least I do not feel it for the time being, and the degree of my suffering is far less than the suffering that is perhaps my due. | Franz Kafka | ||
| 52416f1 | It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones. | despair hope | Franz Kafka | |
| 5719d37 | However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them | self-expression society words | Franz Kafka | |
| eb79817 | nh lnsyn llf llHlm ldhy try'y lf mrh , w tm nsynh lf mrh | Franz Kafka |