Holly > Holly's Quotes

“He was like the bed at a party on which they pile the coats.”
― George Saunders, Tenth of December

“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around! We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“It seemed...that intelligence wasn't as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person's company and yet wicked in another's. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence...In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent.”
― Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

“What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Am No One You Know

“The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.”
― Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps

“I used to think I knew all the answers...That's why I left. I know what to do, I thought. Perhaps you have to persuade yourself you know the answers, otherwise you don't ever do anything. I thought I knew the answers when I married--or at least, I thought I was going to find them out. I thought I knew the answers when I left. Now I'm not sure. Or rather, I know the answers to different things now. Perhaps that's it: we're only capable of knowing the answers to a certain number of things at any particular time.”
― Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

“We did very badly and almost did not do at all. Flesh poor flesh failed us. ... Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx--my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me -- we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!).”
― Walker Percy

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones?”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“I broke out into a sweat and the worlds of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain -- his notion that we are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

“We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“But like a pretty pleated skirt at a country dance, Lily flounced right on out.”
― Nicola Barker, Wide Open

“In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. ”
― Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!

“You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.”
― George Saunders, Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness

“It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying. It improves nothing. It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“I was back to feeling myself which, believe me, is no picnic.”
― George Saunders, Tenth of December

“Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“The trouble was, how could you know what question to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point of that?”
― Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

“...as for knowing your own mind, this seemed a bewildering process. How could you know your own mind without using your mind to discover your mind in the first place?”
― Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

“You ask me what life is? It is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known.”
― Chekhov

“According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at forty-three, and that's that...The neck is a dead give-away. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to if it had a neck.”
― Nora Ephron

“Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“I want a more difficult life, that's all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I do want to try. It's to do with me, not you; so don't worry.”
― Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

“Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (thought they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of things. She needed to know that she would carry on being herself.”
― Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone