Bolton > Bolton's Quotes

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“Even at five I was thinking about the mystic connection one could discover in another. The idea that you could travel through life with someone seemed to me like the zenith of happiness. Life, like a double-sticked Popsicle, was meant to be cracked down the middle. Here, I’d say. One half for you, one half for me. Red’s my favorite flavor, too. When you finish, keep the stick. There’s a joke written on it.”
― John Glynn, Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer

“This was where I thrived, in the moments of haze: the dancing, the music, the collective buzz. Chaos was intimacy; distraction was intimacy. Watching a friend do blow off the dresser was intimacy. My”
― John Glynn, Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer

“Just because something is imagined doesn't mean it isn't dangerous. Sometimes the things we believe in are the most dangerous things about us. That's why people build entire worlds in their minds. Because they think they're safe. But they're wrong. Dreams are like parasites. They grow up in the dark within us, and they grow deadly.”
― Ryan La Sala, Reverie

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Sometimes he wakes so far from himself that he can’t even remember who he is. “Where am I?” he asks, desperate, and then, “Who am I? Who am I?”
And then he hears, so close to his ear that it is as if the voice is originating inside his own head, Willem’s whispered incantation. “You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs.
“You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen.
“You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way.
“You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it.
“You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again.
“You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“And this is how life goes: there will be times where you feel like nothing more than a patchwork quilt of all the worst parts of yourself, and then there will be times when the call to be better is just so lovely and clear, like a bell ringing at a frequency all the voices that keep you up at night can’t hear.”
― Sam Lansky, Broken People

“...healing isn’t just the part that looks like healing. You don’t just get fixed in a weekend. You have to keep making the choice to fix yourself. Every time you choose to be nice to yourself instead of being unkind. Every time you decide to experience life fully in all its shades of joy and sorrow. Every time you participate in the boring drudgery of self-care. The whole thing was the healing—everything that came before and everything that’s happened after.”
― Sam Lansky, Broken People

“Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“Fathers and sons and brothers, all of us tall and strong and failing. But all of us trying.”
― Sam Lansky, The Gilded Razor: A Memoir

“What was that thing that his teacher had said? It’s not about what you remember. It’s about why you remember it that way.”
― Sam Lansky, Broken People

“I'm conscious this could be rather burdensome to hear, but you remain the thing I have most chosen for myself. The thing that's most exclusively mine. The one thing that brings me the deepest joy.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“These weren’t just yeah whatever kisses. They weren’t take it or leave it, get your coat you’ve pulled kisses. They were everything I thought I could never have, everything I’d been pretending I never wanted, telling me that I was worth it, that he’d be there for me and put up with me and wouldn’t let me drive him away.
Oliver Blackwood was giving all that to me, and I was giving it right back. In the clutch of hands and the press of bodies and the urgent heat of his mouth on mine.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“You’re more than a bonus, Lucien. You’re integral.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“I’m conscious this could be rather burdensome to hear, but you remain the thing I have most chosen for myself. The thing that’s most exclusively mine. The one that brings me the deepest joy.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“I can’t really talk about it, but we’ve just got the English language rights for a really prestigious Swedish author. And everybody has been clamouring to read her debut novel, which is being billed as A Hundred Years of Solitude meets Gone Girl. But there was a lot of debate amongst the team over whether to give it an English title or stick with the Swedish original, and it all wound up being sorted out very last minute and so now the book’s gone to press as I’m Out of the Office at the Moment. Please Forward Any Translation Work to My Personal Email Address.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“...if we let happy things make us unhappy when they stopped, there would be no point having happy things”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“It's as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He smiled, and his face was like the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown so to me on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman