Helen Pandolfi > Helen's Quotes

“I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood – that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word 'escape' used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“He says the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.”
― D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“When all else fails, philosophize.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic

“Nothing must happen to you
No, what am I saying
Everything must happen to you
And it must be wonderful”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People