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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a1a5b61 | I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else. | job vocation | Claire Messud | |
| 14562b0 | I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong. | Claire Messud | ||
| 41f2993 | Maybe, instead, I'll set the world on fire. I just might. | Claire Messud | ||
| 22e14c8 | Have you ever asked yourself whether you'd rather fly or be invisible? | Claire Messud | ||
| 5fd7683 | When you're the Woman Upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all. | Claire Messud | ||
| 0e03076 | would not, could not, make a significant overture. My pride depended on this. She would have needed to make the effort, enough to be openly vulnerable; she would have had to risk my revenge. I like to think I wouldn't have rebuffed her, but it's possible that I would have. It's possible that I would have felt the need to exercise the power if I'd had it. But she didn't grant me the opportunity | Claire Messud | ||
| f938d1c | Isn't it funny," she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, "that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much--and that weather. Do you remember, Nora? I've never had a harder time." (Except, she said "time-e.") "I guess I didn't realize it was" | Claire Messud | ||
| dcb944d | The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its lobby, for one thing, was little more than a wide corridor, with two drably upholstered wing chairs propped against a wall and, between them, a glass table upon which rested an elaborate but unaesthetic arrangement of silk flowers. The light in.. | Claire Messud | ||
| 9304f83 | It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL." | humour humourosly-inspirational strength stress women | Claire Messud | |
| 562b95b | An inchoate ball of ambition, Julius knew that he had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return. | Claire Messud | ||
| 838a6d6 | From anywhere: where once he had feared that this immense city would set him adrift, a spinning atom in the ether, and where once he had seen in this the ultimate terror of insignificance, he now, and suddenly, and so clearly, saw that his fate had led him here. His fate had taken him off two trains this morning, had raised him to the surface at Whitehall Street, had shown him the spinning atoms, unraveling, the end of life, all of them peo.. | Claire Messud | ||
| bfaed27 | and of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing. | Claire Messud | ||
| 489ab67 | Americans see everything too simply-a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it's the wrong question. | Claire Messud | ||
| 6a3d4aa | The person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world. Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have--that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see tha.. | Claire Messud | ||
| 021715f | And then, suddenly, there's something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there's an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn't have imagined, and - elation!-it feels as though you've found the pot of gold, when you'd thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It's enough, for a time - maybe even for a long time - to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all. | Claire Messud | ||
| c972ba0 | From the beginning, then, but briefly. | Claire Messud | ||
| 4b76a54 | Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden heart's desires. Life, art, motherhood. Love and the great seductive promise that I wasn't nothing. That I could be seen for my unvarnished self, and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could, that indeed she must, leave a trace upon the world. | Claire Messud | ||
| 2e9c71b | The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, | Claire Messud | ||
| f58723d | I discovered I could hate her a bit, and because I didn't tell her so, because our friendship went along on this reduced, part-time scale that didn't allow for arguments, there was no noticeable change in our relationship. | Claire Messud | ||
| dd2f498 | He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I've come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, .. | Claire Messud | ||
| 5c0eecd | But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes. | Claire Messud | ||
| 77c401c | It's hard to grasp all the different things that are going on at one time, or that went on at one time. | Claire Messud | ||
| 0ffa1be | but this is what I think: you only see what you expect to see. Your brain lets the rest go. Because life's tumult, with its infinite sounds and smells and signs, rushes around you like a river in flood: you can only take in, you can only grasp, so much. | Claire Messud | ||
| 11b6244 | all frail sufferers from the same disease that affected me, all ailing bibliomanes being treated for addiction, as in a literary methadone clinic... | John Banville | ||
| 0e64cfd | Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense. | John Banville | ||
| 28d83f1 | The big rippled sheets of glass were taken out of their sacking and lowered from the back of the wagon, and for a few giddy moments a troupe of rubbery dwarves and etiolated giants shimmied and shivered in those depthless caskets. of light. | John Banville | ||
| 9c4b5ac | It was not a wave but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself. | John Banville | ||
| 9300a90 | How is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant? | John Banville | ||
| b4b88c4 | He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny. | John Banville | ||
| 0fb21b1 | O my friends!- to be queer was very bliss. The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but there young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear | John Banville | ||
| ca0b792 | Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees? | John Banville | ||
| 43b5959 | In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that. | John Banville | ||
| b3329f0 | The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend. | John Banville | ||
| 8a9c278 | Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it. For | John Banville | ||
| 5f2dca1 | In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt? | John Banville | ||
| 79fbae5 | Tendo a non fare molto caso alle altre persone - l'ho gia detto in precedenza, e uno dei miei difetti piu gravi - e nelle rare occasioni in cui metto la testa fuori dal guscio e do una bella occhiata, quello che mi colpisce in modo strabiliante non e quanto siano diversi da me, ma quanto siano simili, malgrado tutto. | John Banville | ||
| 99c3590 | Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy's world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching onto things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriad-ness, that the world takes on, is both the attraction and terror of being a spy. Attraction, becau.. | John Banville | ||
| 6cceaf4 | I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said. | John Banville | ||
| a2138f0 | Years ago, he shaved off his beard, without telling her, just appeared at the breakfast table one morning with half his face missing, or so it seemed to her in the first, shocked moment of seeing him. If she had met him in the street she would not have recognised him, except for his eyes. How strange he looked, grotesque, almost, with those indecently naked cheeks and the chin flat and square like the blunt edge of a stone axe. It was as if.. | beardless coma razor | John Banville | |
| eec34e7 | It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nona.. | John Banville | ||
| a5087f0 | Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much more than a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self. | John Banville | ||
| 8427a55 | This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant. | John Banville | ||
| afb85d7 | When I look back, no matter how hard I try I can see clear break between one phase and another. It is a seamless flow - although flow is too strong a word. More a sort of busy stasis, a sort of running on the spot. Even that was too fast for me, however, I was always a little way behind, trotting in the rear of my own life. In Dublin I was still the boy growing up at Coolgrange, in America I was the callow young man of Dublin days, on the i.. | John Banville | ||
| b9ca164 | Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead. | John Banville |