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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 77d9220 | Hannah is missing school because one night, her father exiled her and her mother and Allison from the house. This was, obviously, somewhat insane. But it wasn't more insane or cruel than other things he's done, which is not to say he's insane or cruel all the time. He's himself; he can be perfectly pleasant; he's the weather system they live with , and all the behavior, whenever he is around, hinges on his mood. Don't the three of them unde.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 5bfdc8f | When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times. --Mark Twain | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| dc841c3 | When I was in junior high, I used to think I would turn out to be one of the guys, and boys would say, 'Oh, you're so great,' but they wouldn't date me. I thought I wasn't pretty enough. But then I got to Ault and first of all, I'm not really friends with any guys. And then, with you this year, I thought, if Cross will keep hooking up with me, maybe I'm okay after all. But time passed and I never became your girlfriend. And so then I though.. | looks love unhappiness yearning | Curtis Sittenfeld | |
| 80cf9da | I couldn't tell them about Cross, I thought. I couldn't tell them because Dede liked him and because she wouldn't believe or understand it, and I couldn't tell them because I myself was unsure what there was to believe or understand. It wasn't like he'd kissed me, or made any declarations. What could I claim? For years and years, I felt this way, not just about Cross but about other guys - if they didn't kiss you, it didn't mean anything. T.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 26443fb | After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed - on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn't have a game - and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn't get would hardly m.. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 524543a | Later that year, when snow started to hide the front steps, when morning became evening as I sat on the sofa, buried under everything I'd lost, I made a fire and used my laughter for kindling: "Ha ha ha!" "Ha ha ha!" "Ha ha ha!" | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 97375db | It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and w.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 7e45a19 | She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad not-truths, even, but he nodded, and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of the story is always an absence and he wanted to live among presences. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 5b78beb | I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad... | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 38cca1a | When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting. I'm not speculating. This is our reality. Look at what factory farming is. Look at what we as a society have done to animals as soon as we had the technological power. Look at what we actually do in the name of "animal welfare" and "humaneness," then decide if you still believe in eating meat." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| fa0d576 | There is noting wrong with not understanding yourself. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a345455 | creating a trail of things i wasn't able to tell you | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a7707b4 | Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 26e0227 | 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 boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe. 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, like the turtle that everything e.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e025f5b | Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can't we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our di.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 83f3007 | I once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! I'd heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldn't see the walls through all of the paintings! They'd painted the ceilings, the 82 plates, the windows, the lampshades! Was it an act of rebellion! An act of expression! Were the paintings good, or was that beside the point! I needed to see it for myself, and I needed to tel.. | heaven-and-hell hell | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| f9d241f | The center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| ce9a327 | she cried and cried and cried, there weren't any napkins nearby so I ripped the page from the book - "I don't speak. I'm sorry." - and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation and apology ran down her face like mascara (..)" | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 79bf0b0 | Blessings are just curses that other people envy. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| b98daa8 | The end of suffering does not justify the suffering | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 675f1b2 | 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 bought 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 me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was s.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 802fb92 | Why couldn't she have slid it under the door? he wondered. Why couldn't she have folded it? It looked just like any other note she would leave him, like, Could you try to fix the broken knocker? or I'll be back soon, don't worry. It was so strange to him that such a different kind of note - I had to do it for myself - could look exactly the same: trivial, mundane, nothing. He could have hated her for leaving it there in plain sight, and he .. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| be55b2c | I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 0d473cf | I asked her why she was getting so upset about such a small thing. She said, 'It doesn't feel small to me. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 9f57a58 | maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 7a9c449 | Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable--the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction. | family food mythology religion stories veganism vegetarianism | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 6700f83 | I am very simple to enchant. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f677bb4 | I went to the lobby and asked Stan what he knew about the person who lived in 6A. He said 'Never seen anyone go in or come out. Just a lot of deliveries and a lot of trash.' 'Cool'. He leaned down and whispered 'Haunted'. I whispered back 'I don't believe in the paranormal'. He said 'Ghosts don't care if you believe in them'. I walked back up the steps, this time past our floor and to the sixth. There was a mat in front of the door which .. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| adc4d78 | S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f5d2cdf | Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive and thinking is killing me | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 30a02ec | What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you'd turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you'd turn brown, and if you were blue you'd turn blue. Everyone.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| a751e6d | As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad's last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something. Dad would have known. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 39f7030 | About 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| ccb548a | I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 090a146 | When she found a place of her own and packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear, "He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she's there all day." -- | love marriage proposal relationship | Ian McEwan | |
| 28fcd12 | By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives. | Ian McEwan | ||
| ca86462 | Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button? | Ian McEwan | ||
| 2328640 | I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 89c5a10 | She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn't let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil. | memories robbie war | Ian McEwan | |
| e1c1e91 | He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy | Ian McEwan | ||
| 30021be | Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted .. | Ian McEwan | ||
| a0b1858 | She left the cafe, and as she walked along the Common she felt the distance widen between her and another self, no less real, who was walking back toward the hospital. Perhaps the Briony who was walking in the direction of Balham was the imagined or ghostly persona. This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyon.. | Ian McEwan | ||
| c700321 | It seems so dreadful to be a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one's dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, having to carry one's meal home in one's hand, unable to expect anyone with a lazy sense of calm confidence, able only with difficulty and vexation to give a gift to someone, having to say good night at the front door, never being able to run up a stairway beside one'.. | Franz Kafka | ||
| 8cdfbde | Don't be too hasty, don't take somebody else's opinion without testing it. | Franz Kafka |