1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
2568
2569
2570
2571
2572
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f5ad129 | I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| a3624e4 | But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 6fb2575 | Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| cd44858 | At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure--even at a time of the month when this could not be true--that I had blood on my s.. | Alice Munro | ||
| f89ce91 | All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be. | Alice Munro | ||
| d907026 | Long after all the chocolates were eaten, and the cousins had gone, we kept the chocolate-box in the linen-drawer in the dining-room sideboard, waiting for some ceremonial use that never presented itself. It was still full of the empty chocolate cups of dark, fluted paper. In the wintertime I would sometimes go into the cold dining room and sniff at the cups, inhaling their smell of artifice and luxury; I would read again the descriptions o.. | Alice Munro | ||
| 8feb303 | The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything--and by "remember" she meant experience it in her mind, one more time--then store it away forever. This day's experience set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." -- | Alice Munro | ||
| 9c93ff9 | A man's fate is a man's fate and life is but an illusion. | James Clavell | ||
| 870e6cd | Hey. Nobody has any trouble believing in the internet, right, which really is magic. So what's the problem believing in a virtual private network for Santa's business? It results in real toys, real presents, delivered by Christmas morning, what's the difference? | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| dda33f8 | Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 1a2e49c | Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| a302bbe | What Jessica said--hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of different outline, harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of letters between them--was: "We're going to be married. We're trying very hard to have a baby." All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity and Roger. "I don't care. Have his baby. I'll love you both--just come with me Jess, please... I need you...." She flips a red lever on her interco.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 122c5a5 | And it wasn't that you couldn't be friends with a married woman, but you weren't friends in the same way, she didn't have the same freedom i her schedule, especially not after she had children, and even before that, she didn't need you; you needed friendship, and friendship to her was auxiliary, extra. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 27d304d | She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. She learned impossibly difficult songs on her violin, songs outside of what she thought she could know, and would each time come crying to Yankel, I have learned to play this one too! It's so terrible! I must write some- thing that not even I can play! She spent evenings with the art books Yank.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 7fcb605 | Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.' I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways... | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 655e2ed | Oh,' she said. 'I have never seen a Jew before. Can I see his horns? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| be4cbec | I have tutored Little Igor to be a man of this world. For example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore, so that he should be appraised of the many positions in which I am carnal. 'This is sixty-nine,' I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers--two of them--on the action, so that he would not overlook it. 'Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?' he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. 'It .. | sex | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| d6765c3 | An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled. | philosophical-reflection | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 528cf05 | The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is inside of me. She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with the chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently. When I was your age, my grandfather gought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told m.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 57d55af | If I'd been somone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent. | quotes-to-define-my-life | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 50c77a9 | I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 46a3b8e | I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| dfa09c2 | She would say to him, "But you are no priest." And he would say, "I am today." And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e6b25b8 | A Seeing Eye bitch is not only for blind people but for people who pine for the negative of loneliness. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 392ad02 | Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family -- unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods -- should we ear animals? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 93eadc0 | She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 840d9a7 | From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 4be50bd | Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it's happening. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| adbc265 | Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It's easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting w.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 421bb8f | I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 0497b35 | All that mattered was him looking at me | him love | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| a6f9b72 | When I got off the plane, after eleven hours of travel and forty years away, the man took my passport and asked me the purpose of my visit, I wrote in my daybook, "To mourn," and then, "To mourn try to live," he gave me a look and asked if I would consider that business or pleasure, I wrote, "Neither." "For how long do you plan to mourn and try to live?" "For as long as I can." "Are we talking about a weekend or a year?" I didn't write anyt.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 10ae929 | To try to live. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 2b27614 | Grandfather] would manufacture funnies with Grandmother before she died about how he was in love with other women who were not her. She knew it was only funnies because she would laugh in volumes. 'Anna,' he would say, 'I am going to marry that one with the pink hat.' And she would say, 'To whom are you going to marry her?' And he would say, 'To me.' I would laugh very much in the back seat, and she would say to him, 'But you are no priest... | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 31a7283 | Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, s.. | jonathan-safran-foer | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 148c14d | What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? | feeling life-and-death | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| b615168 | The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 7a19a77 | A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write because that was exactly how it felt. | family fatherhood love motherhood parenthood | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 5cbda36 | They'd been here twenty seconds, and already nothing was happening. | going-out | Denis Johnson | |
| 5332022 | There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 8a6e1fe | Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you even know the difference?" | Denis Johnson | ||
| efba599 | Not all the people living at Beverly Home were old and helpless. Some were young but paralyzed. Some weren't past middle age but were already demented. Others were fine, except that they couldn't be allowed out on the street with their impossible deformities. They made God look like a senseless maniac. One man had a congenital bone ailment that had turned him into a seven-foot-tall monster. His name was Robert. Each day Robert dressed himse.. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 27485b5 | I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 7045b10 | It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you. | Denis Johnson |