El > El's Quotes

“It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.
It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.
What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.
Now even that had flickered out.
How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.
Somebody did.
A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You alright?"
Yes," I said.
You've been standing here a long time," he said.
I know," I said.
You waiting for somebody?" he said.
No," I said.
Better move on, don't you think?" he said.
Yes, sir," I said.
And I moved on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax...”
― Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England

“He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.
He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers.
The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars.
I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky.
Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening.
Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables.
I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear.
There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day.
That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof.
I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again.
And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl.
Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor.
I don't quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that.
I wanted to be saying it's just something that happens.
But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose.
Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink.
Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth.
I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what's wrong.
But there was no one there, and no one came. ”
― Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things

“I helped Jiko to her feet and we walked back to the bus stop together, holding hands again. I was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can't hold on to water , still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Is that vodka?" Margarita asked weakly.
The cat jumped up in his seat with indignation.
"I beg pardon, my queen," he rasped, "Would I ever allow myself to offer vodka to a lady? This is pure alcohol!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“It's funny about love', Sophia said. 'The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.'
'That's very true,' Grandmother observed. 'And so what do you do?'
'You go on loving,' said Sophia threateningly. 'You love harder and harder.”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn't know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote.
Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny — and in less than a week there was an honest to god revolution under way, just as jakes had said. There's the power of the press for you.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

“Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

--The Sensible Thing”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories

“They had no children. They spent money on the house, and for five years it went through an elaborate series of new looks each one more ambitiously designed than the next, until to scratch the wall in the bathroom was to reveal a rainbow of pastel shades in which could be read my mother's hopeless biannual efforts to sustain her domestic dream.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“..Window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for two months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness - Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“My father's hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“Today, however, she didn't go looking for urchins or broken shells. She simply walked to the end of the earth and stood a while.”
― John Burnside, A Summer of Drowning

“This girl - this thin, cold child in a hand-me-down cardigan and faded dress - hated me, not for anything I was or had done, but because I existed, in her world, and she didn't want me there.”
― John Burnside, A Summer of Drowning

“..and she had started to relax - but she was relaxing into something terrible, and she was going about the world in a state of complete indifference to whatever might come, a wild girl with dream patterns and faint, dark animals etched on her skin, a creature who had passed beyond fear and was, therefore, beyond saving.”
― John Burnside, A Summer of Drowning

“Really there are very few adults these days who possess the mental and emotional self-sufficiency necessary for leading satisfactory existence in these remote parts.
When the day light lasts for only five or six hours, when the Never Silent - as the Norsemen called the wind - howls down the corries and the snow is lying so deep that even the deer are unable to reach the croft in search of food, then one learns what it means to be cut off from the outside world, and either one grows to accept and appreciate spells of complete isolation, or else the isolation begins to sap one's confidence and to terrify.”
― Rowena Farre, Seal Morning

“It's cold and it's winter and the world has gone to sleep”
― James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“I love you. You're the only one." She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 8: Worlds' End

“Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's

“I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”
― Paul Auster, Moon Palace