Alice Urchin > Alice's Quotes

“She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“I made orange juice from concentrate and showed her the trick of squeezing the juice of one real orange into it. It removes the taste of being frozen. She marveled at this, and I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”
― Miranda July

“Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“She bludgeoned me with a look of such limitless compassion that I immediately began to cry.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him. Most people don't know that the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.”
― Amy Bloom, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories

“A blind man can see how much I love you”
― Amy Bloom (Author)

“Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.”
― Amy Bloom, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories

“In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.”
― Amy Bloom, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories

“I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else's life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.”
― Amy Bloom, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories

“I read like a wolf eats.
I read myself to sleep every night.”
― Gary Paulsen

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“When I desire you a part of me is gone...”
― Anne Carson

“Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.”
― Anne Carson

“What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.”
― Anne Carson

“Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”
― Anne Carson

“The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.”
― Anne Carson

“I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
― Sir Francis Bacon

“I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?”
― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.”
― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“You...you've been here quite a long time, haven't you?"
What? Oh...yes. Ever since I married What's-her-name. Uh, Martha. Even before that. Forever. Dashed hopes, and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. How do you like that for a declension, young man?”
― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“You want to dance with me, angel tits?”
― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must ..... eventually ..... fall.”
― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?