WWNorton > WWNorton's Quotes

“When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.”
― Nicole Krauss, Great House

“If I had planned this farm from the outset, it might have looked different, perhaps more deliberate. As it happened, the circuitous route of development gave this project a more 'organic' style of growth. Through successes and failures the farm took shape and now reflects my interests and skills, the nature of this soil and the climate here.”
― Kurt Timmermeister, Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land

“Svensson is renovating his ruin.”
― Thomas Pletzinger, Funeral for a Dog

“I'm just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart—one-third bullshit, one-third booze, and one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing.”
― António Lobo Antunes, The Land at the End of the World

“You must take a year off, one of these days, before you’re old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you’ll see the world in a different way.”
― Helon Habila, Oil on Water

“Our stories don’t fit on a newspaper page. I’m tired of newspaper pages, Elisabeth. Life is a spiral, not a line.”
― Thomas Pletzinger, Funeral for a Dog

“The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane's heart.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, Once Upon a River

“If you want to feel like ginger ale Claire, drink a ginger ale.”
― Ann Hood, The Obituary Writer

“As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Nothing seems more inevitable than the status quo, and yet nothing is more certain than that it will—eventually—end suddenly and that we will need to make our lives in a new, unfamiliar and unexpected landscape.”
― Frederic C. Rich, Christian Nation

“A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.”
― John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote

“Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.”
― Mark Slouka, Brewster

“Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.”
― Mark Slouka, Brewster

“What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“But Benny was already walking through the doors and into the bright sunny day, pulling the bottle from his shirt and thrusting it at his father: terrified, astonished, ready for his love.”
― Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans

“It is never too late to apply good sense as a corrective to stupidity.”
― David Ignatius, Bloodmoney

“I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence. The two things don't go together.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves

“Rule #12: The correct number of bikes to own is N+1, where N is the number of bikes currently owned.”
― The Velominati, The Rules: The Way of the Cycling Disciple

“The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys

“But despite the ease, theirs was also a world of intrigue and secrets, in which wit and flashy derring-do were rewarded. In such circles, people began to call my father Silver Tongue, and so my mother did, too, smiling and teasing him about his ease with people and his facility with words, all the while feeling intimidated by those things herself.”
― Scott C. Johnson, The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA

“What [my father] didn’t say, but what was understood, was that he needed me to lie for him from then on, and lie like a professional. I had license to dissimulate, fabricate, invent, cover-up, and deceive if necessary. There was a greater good.”
― Scott C. Johnson, The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA

“We could see the impact of an explosion long before the boom, so a hill out there on the horizon, maybe a mile or two away, suddenly disappeared in a raft of dust, and moments later we felt in our skulls the shattering crack arriving from across the desert. I wondered if whole towns were being obliterated.”
― Scott C. Johnson, The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA

“Apparently, we flew. We were lifted high, flung about like a tetherball; five tons of metal and steel, and another half-ton of human flesh, lifted up more than a yard—60 inches high—to the height of my throat; lifted as if by God’s hand, shot up from underneath, or within, a pop of the weasel, straight into the palm of the Lord.”
― Scott C. Johnson, The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA

“Very little made him happier than pulling into his driveway and seeing, through the window, his family moving around inside, a diorama of his life he could effortlessly step back into.”
― Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans

“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.”
― Mary Norris

“There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.”
― Mary Norris

“Sometimes writing a sentence can be harder than serving one.”
― James Magnuson, Famous Writers I Have Known