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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 46242b9 | Nobody said anything while I opened the bag and took out the egg salad sandwich. It was one of those funny moments when a bit of normal human activity embarrasses everybody out of their bluster and hostility, and roles are momentarily laid aside. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| d997fd4 | She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek..."Don't do that", I said. "You just met me. This is New York." | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 8a2c596 | Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. | school summer vacation | Jonathan Lethem | |
| b00b555 | The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind. And that's what you need, what you needed all along. | liner-notes memories | Jonathan Lethem | |
| e226955 | I'd underestimated him. I assumed anyone who started out gut-punching you in an elevator couldn't have all that much else in his arsenal. For instance, I had no idea he could smile, let alone at such an inappropriate time. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 3084581 | He seemed happy. She thought that she seldom concerned herself about Laurence's being happy. She wanted him to be in a good mood, so that everything would go smoothly, but that was not the same thing. | Alice Munro | ||
| 79bba17 | The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust. | Alice Munro | ||
| 8cd0d90 | People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life. | Alice Munro | ||
| 2d0a267 | You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled. | Alice Munro | ||
| 11a5af3 | It seems so ridiculous to me,' he said, 'that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean like the suit of clothes of an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can't ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and th.. | Alice Munro | ||
| d559e6a | So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses. | Alice Munro | ||
| a2e8420 | A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape. | Alice Munro | ||
| cf2377a | It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long, brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they .. | Alice Munro | ||
| be0e0ab | Patience means holding back your inclination to the seven emotions: hate, adoration, joy, anxiety, anger, grief, fear. If you don't give way to the seven, you're patient, then you'll soon understand all manner of things and be in harmony with Eternity.' | James Clavell | ||
| 2e67df2 | This sunset exists. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only now. Please look. It is so beautiful and it will never happen ever again, never, not this sunset, never in all infinity. | James Clavell | ||
| 09bf998 | Gods are like people. They believe anything if you tell them right way. | 1966 belief gods may-may offerings | James Clavell | |
| 1bbd13d | Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. But they did not prosper... about all they did was persist | truth | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 92aad44 | You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9bb76c4 | The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| bfc8dfb | They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals--but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transce.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| f34b73f | Holy shit." This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer that can be foun.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9ba31f5 | She nodded, jotting something in her notebook. You're writing that down? Has the interview started?" Lee, whenever you're talking to a reporter, you're being interviewed." | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| a03c7b1 | To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door? | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 2a82ae2 | You don't make waves unless there's a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that's it. You're a trouble make, and they never think of you any other way. | power revelation trouble-maker waves | Curtis Sittenfeld | |
| b83482b | Such compliments--they were thrilling but almost impossible to absorb in this quantity, at this pace. It was like she was being pelted with magnificent hail, and she wished she could save the individual stones to examine later, but they'd exist with such potency only now, in this moment. | hail love | Curtis Sittenfeld | |
| ed79868 | Being called baby: like safaris and bowling leagues, a phenomenon she never thought she'd experience first hand. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 2ff4b95 | I think about all of the things I've done, Oskar. And all of the things I didn't do. The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 4a0935b | But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 2d6165f | The moment before he started was my favorite moment. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e0c6b3d | Life overflows with imperfections, but some matter more than others | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| ee7ae9e | Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum! | jonathan-safran-foer oskar-schell sad | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| e73a7c8 | I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 1411c94 | I promised myself I wouldn't be the first to look away, but I was. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| bf16b12 | was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 9267263 | The dream that we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod, 41 without knowing why, and looked into my reflection in the water. I couldn't look away. What was the image that pulled me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then I recognized it. So simple. In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we we.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 2975610 | They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 19e8a06 | Your train ride appeased you?" I asked. "Oh, God," he said, "twenty-six hours, fucking unbelievable." This girl Unbelievable must be very majestic, I thought." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 7a4b193 | And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 89921fc | We just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| da54883 | He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of cours, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 71a1d24 | One can build a perfect home, but not live in it. | life | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 4acc82a | The wanting, the needing, the distance, the disappointment: growing, knowing, committing, aging beside another. Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| d536657 | Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| b7c4b4b | In the end, everyone looses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of. | Jonathan Safran Foer |