Art Rodriguez > Art's Quotes

“I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.”
― Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“...crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.”
― Jim Crace, The Pesthouse

“Man is bound to lie about himself”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Moderation in all things, especially moderation.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Necessity is a mother.”
― David Carr, The Night of the Gun

“There is no such thing as a social crack user.”
― David Carr, The Night of the Gun

“AMPLE make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this ground.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Wooded islands foregrounded the mainland darkly.”
― Miranda Weiss, Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska

“It would take a year before the answers to those questions became clear, but much longer to realize that it was too easy to pick up a man's dream, his measure of the world, rather than fashion one of my own.”
― Miranda Weiss, Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska

“Those moments of knowing are sharp and merciless, but then they fade out, like stars when the sky gets light in the morning. You know, and then you don't know.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“The word "miss" is so wistful. As is the word "wistful," for that matter. They both have sighs embedded in them, that "iss" sound. Which also sounds like if.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“Young" and "Poor" sounded so promising, the way my mother always told the story. Temporary conditions: poignant "befores" that existed only to contrast with the triumphant "afters.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“It's Violent.
You imagine it deafening, red, boiling-hot. It's like a comic book: the bright colors, the crude outlines, the words in capital letters: BANG!SMASH!CRUNCH! You think "smithereens."
You crave the explosion.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“And while some healing does happen, it isn't a healing of redemption or epiphany. It's more like the slow absorption of a bruise.”
― Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order

“it smelled like jail...sore knees and loose assholes.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“the lonliest sound in the world is other people making love.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“You can wait only so long for a blackened window to be illuminated.”
― Brock Clarke, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

“A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“That day was turning out to be longer than The Brothers Karamazov.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“vous avez poison au coeur”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Memories are worse than bullets.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened,”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Coincidences are the scars of fate.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón