Amy > Amy's Quotes

“I wish we could keep on forgetting to remember ourselves.”
― Julie Buxbaum, The Opposite of Love

“Ruth smiles, which rearranges the lines on her face. She inverts her parentheses and transforms commas into apostrophes. The pattern is that of a woman who has no regrets.”
― Julie Buxbaum, The Opposite of Love

“That's the blessing and the curse of loss: You don't get to choose what falls within the inevitable dissolution of recollection or what lingers and haunts you late at night, your head heavy with memories, while your husband dreams of scaling walls in spandex tights.This is who I am: someone who simultaneously longs for and fears the commitment of remembering. There is the forgetting, the disintegration of memory, morsel by morsel; and there is the impossibility of forgetting, the scar tissue, with is insulated layers of padding. Both haunt me in their own way.”
― Julie Buxbaum, The Opposite of Love

“I haven't yet figured out who I want to be, dear," Ruth says, answering both my questions, and then throws her head back in a hearty, unselfconscious laugh. "I'm not kidding. I haven't figure it out yet. But don't tell my daughters that. I lie to them every day. I tell them they will figure it out, with time. To just keep doing what they are doing. But let me let you in on a little secret, because I think you can handle it.' She leans in to whisper in my ear.

All parents lie to their children. It's our duty. But the truth of the matter is, I don't think many of us know what we are doing. We all walk around much of the time confused and very much alone.”
― Julie Buxbaum, The Opposite of Love

“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life. That is something to remember when you meet the old classmate who says, "Well now, on our last expedition up the Congo-" or the one who says, "Gee, I got the sweetest little wife and three of the swellest kids ever-" You must remember it when you sit in hotel lobbies or lean over bars to talk to the bartender or walk down a dark street at night, in early March, and stare into a lighted window. And remember little Susie has adenoids and the bread is probably burned, and turn up the street, for the time has come to hand me down that walking cane, for I got to catch that midnight train, for all my sin is taken away. For whatever you live is life”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed with a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is the way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, the laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes with bands on their teeth. She could get all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion....if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I've discovered in life. And you can have it, since it's been of no use to me.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“If he’s not gay and he hung out with you the whole time, he wanted to be. It’s boyfriend or want to be boyfriend or I guess gay. Those are the choices.”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“Because our nation is stupid and Hollywood is coarse, there is no one to tell us of the deep and extraordinary beauty of older women. I now see them all around me and am filled with a fierce joy that one of them has come to live in my house.”
― Pat Conroy, The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life

“There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters.”
― Pat Conroy, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son

“The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?”
― W.E.B. DuBois, W.E.B. Du Bois Reader

“America wrestles with its obesity crisis to such an extent that Americans forget there are worse weight problems on earth than obesity.”
― Melissa Fay Greene

“Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week. ”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy.”
― Charlaine Harris

“If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
― Terry Pratchett

“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.

Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”
― Stephen Fry

“If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby