Jj > Jj's Quotes

“She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.”
― Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There aren't words vast or specific enough to capture the ecstasy and the ache and love and fear I feel just looking at him now.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“Living, being responsible for myself, seems like an insurmountable challenge lately.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“I hope because I was open about what happened to me, my children will insist on intimacy, on knowing their partner deeply, on being known deeply. I hope they will talk to their partners about money, about what will happen if the partnership ends. I hope that as they build trust in their relationships, they never lose sight of their own authority, their own voice, their own intuition. I hope they will move toward people who are in pain, rather than away. I hope they will understand that every person has experiences that make them who they are. I hope they will fall in love with abandon as I did with their father. I hope they will know, from watching me, that if everything falls apart, they can get up and piece together something new.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories

“All day long, I hear myself saying this same phrase, like I’m desperate to get it out of my body even as I feel incapable: I am having a hard time”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“She seemed to be reminding me of what we’d discussed many times, Everyone has something. This is yours. Each life has a defining crisis.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“It was having everything I had counted on collapse so suddenly, forcing me to let go of the idea that I could control outcomes.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Will father be there?" she asked.

John turned to her in astonishment.

Your father is dead," he replied somberly. "Why should he go to Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long ago."

After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their blankets for the night.

What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fianc_!

Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth."

It was a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."

How pleasant then to be insane!"

So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night's full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."

So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories

“And doesn’t it all look different, wouldn’t your own story look different, if you knew how it was going to end?”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“Slowly, over many months, as my head came out of the sand, a form of joy set in —joy born of replacing the not knowing with knowing, the nub of worry with clarity, the lack of control with control...I thought, 'this is better than everything I lost. This is better than the life I thought I wanted.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“And I could see that the cost for feeling safe was being controlled. They were two sides of the same coin—protection and control.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“We had all been taught to fill in the hole that men left, to be quiet about men behaving badly, to move on with grace.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise