Abigail McGuffin > Abigail's Quotes

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“What does this say about the life you've lived, then?'

'Part of it— just part of it —was a coma, but I prefer to call it a parallel life. It sounds better. Problem is that most of us have— live, that is—more than two parallel lives.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We may never speak about this again. But I hope you’ll never hold it against me that we did. I will have been a terrible father if, one day, you’d want to speak to me and felt that the door was shut or not sufficiently open.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste! (…) How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we got two lives, one is the mockup, the other the finished version. But there’s only one and before you know it, your heart is worn out. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”
― André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

“..time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“Perhaps, says the genius, music doesn't change us that much, nor does great art change us. Instead, it reminds us of who, despite all our claims or denials, we've always known we were and are destined to remain. It reminds us of the mileposts we've buried and hidden and then lost, of the people and things that mattered despite our lies, despite the years. Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It's the surest reminder that we're here for a very short while and that we've neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life. You've lived the wrong life, my friend, and almost defaced the one you were given to live.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“To me it proves that life and time are not in sync. It’s as if time was all wrong and the wife’s life was lived on the wrong bank of the river or, worse yet, on two banks, with neither being the right one. None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough. Basically, we don’t know how to think of time, because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“The more we know someone, the more we shut the doors between us, not the other way around.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“What was it St. Augustine said? "The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“There are times...when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth.

...When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“See that's where it falls apart for me!" Anne cried. "What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can't swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God's in charge or he's not...”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Why is it that God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but it's the doctor's fault when shit happens? When the patient comes through, it's always 'Thank God,' and when the patient dies, it's always blame the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer fucking novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“We are what we fear in others”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“The single craziest thing about being a priest, he’d found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life. One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It’s not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,” Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. “ ‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ ” “But the sparrow still falls,” Felipe said.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Listen to me, Amin," I said slowly. "Listen to me very carefully. Nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same again. There lives on this earth a woman who can be my friend and my lover. Do you understand that? Do you understand what a marvelous thing that is?"

"A friend is a friend," Uthman interrupted, "and a woman is a woman. You can't have them in one person. The whole world knows that."

"If that's what the whole world knows, ...then the whole world is wrong. I believed the whole world, and I lost her.”
― Barbara Cohen, Seven Daughters and Seven Sons

“I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“You see, in our family we don't know whether we're coming or going - it's all my grandmother's fault. But, of course, the fault wasn't hers at all: it lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“Why should we try, why not just take the world as it is? I told her how he had said that we had to try because the alternative wasn’t blankness – it only meant that if we didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of other people’s inventions.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines