Asta > Asta's Quotes

“You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming together,things falling apart,time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. the stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
― William Ernest Henley, Echoes of Life and Death

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
― Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the Country, by Dr. Goldsmith

“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity. It is the glory of Abraham Lincoln that he never abused power only on the side of mercy”
― Robert Ingersoll

“You know what people who go to nude beaches look like?"

"Tell me."

"People who shouldn't go to nude beaches."

"Is Chili Palmer joining the tour?'

"I wasn't told"

"Ask Nick for me."

About a minute went by. Now he heard Nick saying, "Tell him if he goes near Chili Palmer I'll see that he suffers excruciating pain and will never fucking walk again in his life."

And, then Robin's voice: "Nick said to tell you that if you go near Chili Palmer he'll have your legs broken."

"Why couldn't he say it like that?"

"He reads, but the wrong books.”
― Elmore Leonard, Be Cool

“At your next book club meeting, picture me sitting quietly in the corner, taking notes on your preferences. Imagine the next day you get an email from me trying to sell you a new grill — or a book — or accessories for your Glock. That's the Amazon/Goodreads deal. It's appalling. But everywhere in the press, you'll read about the genius of Amazon."
(Michael Herrmann and the booksellers of Gibson's)”
― G.R. Reader, Off-Topic: The Story of an Internet Revolt

“Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons-- because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming-- they don't really count as players.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“—Five languages? I said before he left.
—Yeah. Five languages. And he can lie to himself in every one of them.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“When I weigh 130, my friends think I'm dying and use words like gaunt. When I weight 125, which is almost but not quite what Vogue might be able to deal with, I look as old as Jeanne Moreau when she's just murdered someone.”
― Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

“...in this present moment we always feel that we have fully arrived. We believe we are fair and sensitive, helpful, kind, no longer predatory or racist. But the future will call us out just the same. AS the old saying goes, every generation believes they invented sex and war.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

“Chances are you’ll be alone at the end of your life. Don’t you worry about that?’ … ‘I don’t mind talking about this,’ I said. ‘But I wonder, would you ask Jonathan Franzen the same questions? He doesn’t have children.’ When the interview aired, all the questions about my childlessness had been edited out.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

“In the driveway of the old house,I released my biological family from my unreasonable expectations of how much we could possibly be to one another. How much I expected them to teach me.Do for me. And this freed them to be what they actually are to me. Which is plenty”
― C.J. Hauser, The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

“I've always hated the notion, in life or in fiction, that the human personality is a puzzle to be solved, that we are a single flashback away from understanding why this person is cruel to her children, why that man has a dreamy, downcast look. A human being is not a lock and the past is not a key.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book