Erin > Erin's Quotes

“I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You

“One train wreck at a time, I always say.”
― Tropper Jonathan

“Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“This is the sixty-nine," I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers -- two of them -- on the action, so that he would not overlook it. "Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?" he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. "It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor." "What did people do before 1969?" "Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“There's something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as you're playing team sports, people think you're okay.”
― Polly Horvath, Everything on a Waffle

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“My mother smoked too but I guessed by now she had quit the habit, which was, I supposed, one of the advantages of being shipwrecked.”
― Polly Horvath, Everything on a Waffle

“He stood and he only had one leg. The other was like a chunk of burnt pine-log he was carrying along as a penance for some obscure sin.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Things usually work out in the end."
"What if they don't?"
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission. I was young, but the first tiny, meek beginnings of my rebellion had already clicked into place.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“Mr. Norrell did not know a great deal about war, but he suspected that soldiers are not generally your great respecters of books. They might put their dirty fingers on them. They might tear them! They might- horror of horrors!- read them and try the spells!”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Yet we ought to kill someone!' said the gentleman, immediately reverting to his former subject. 'I have been quite out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Like many spells with unusual names, the Unrobed Ladies was a great deal less exciting than it sounded.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“The clock shows 3 p.m., the two hands cold and distant. They're pretending to be noncommittal, but I know they're not on my side.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Moths must fly to his flame and perish gladly.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“Cat, this is America, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don't take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“...not simple intolerance but the tolerance of intolerance, which allows the intolerance to persist.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

“This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Now comes the difficult part: you must provoke the animal that is afflicting you. Tiger, rhinoceros, ostrich, wild boar, brown bear- no matter the beast, you must get its goat.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Reagan Declares
Firmness on Gulf;
Plans are Unclear

Isn't that classic? I don't mean the semicolon; I mean, isn't that just what the world needs? Unclear firmness! That is typical American policy: don't be clear, but be firm!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.”
― Edward Gorey