Blair > Blair's Quotes

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“The person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world. Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have—that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I've learned it's a mistake to reveal her at all.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Where were my allies? My sad captains? Those moonsick girls I drank with over long winters behind the bowling alley, driven there in cars we didn't know. Those times when we were all strangers and everything was so far away but all we needed to do was run towards it. I had not grown much. I had not reached anywhere. I was still running. When I wasn't lying down.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“So, Laura thinks, this is how it ends: everybody deserves what they get, one way or another. So Virginia was a fraud; so Isobel was a patsy; so Laura’s a fool; so the boys were just coddled, callous idiots who circulated a sex tape of the girl they couldn’t fuck, until poor, stupid Ivan Dixon sent it to Freddy because he couldn’t fuck her, either; so Sebastian Webster wrote a mediocre book and died on the wrong side of history, for no reason but that he was rich, and young, and bored, and the sclerotic modern world was the same then as it is now, and always will be; world without end; and all Webster meant by the rocks and the harbor are one is that in the end you die.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“You leave the analyst's office aware of your singularity and your solitude alike. It's you who lives in the prison of your skin. No one gets the afterglow they want. Everyone dies alone. Analysis is a process. The process is a slow procession. It is a cortège.”
― Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau

“If love is what the world thinks it is," she went on with passionate emphasis, "then I am incapable of it. It is monotony, and I loathe monotony more than anything else in the universe. To live with a person, year in, year out; to see that person at nearly every meal; to hear his opinions again and again! My God, is that what they call love? I call it death! I need passion, colour, the unexpected—the romance of the unknown!”
― Claude Houghton, I Am Jonathan Scrivener

“Like most music that affects me deeply, I would never listen to it while others were around, just as I would not pass on a book that I especially loved to another. I am embarrassed to admit this, knowing that it reveals some essential lack or selfishness in my nature, and aware that it runs contrary to the instincts of most, whose passion for something leads them to want to share it, to ignite a similar passion in others, and that without the benefit of such enthusiasm I would still be ignorant of many of the books and much of the music I love most... But rather than an expansion, I've always felt a diminishment of my own pleasure when I've invited someone else to take part in it, a rupture in the intimacy I felt with the work, an invasion of privacy. It is worst when someone else picks up the copy of a book I've just been enthralled by and begins casually to thumb through the pages.”
― Nicole Krauss, Great House

“The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“I imagined a quiet future in an imaginary world where nothing ever really happened but everything seemed charged with life.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“There are truths I haven’t even told God. And not even myself. I am a secret under the lock of seven keys.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories

“Yesterday, when we were packing, Julius asked me,

"If you could rub Tulip out of your past life, would you do it?"

And I had to shake my head. I can't regret the times we had together. Sometimes I worry I won't have times like that again, that there will be no lit nights, no incandescent days. But I know it's not true. There can be colour in a million ways. I know I'll find it on my own.”
― Anne Fine, The Tulip Touch

“An anxiety with no object or purpose in the present, and in the future nothing but endless sacrifice, by means of which he would attain nothing - that was what his days on earth held in store for him... What good was life to him? What prospects did he have? What did he have to strive for? Was he to live merely in order to exist? But a thousand times before he had been ready to give up his existence for an idea, for a hope, even for an imagining. Existence on its own had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more than that. Perhaps it was merely the strength of his own desires that made him believe he was a person to whom more was allowed than others.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“It’s just that when Isobel says things, Laura believes them, and when Virginia says things Laura believes them, too; it’s just that Laura knows she is so soft, soft enough that anyone can shape her, and she knows enough to know this softness makes her weak.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give

“Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“I had once asked him if he felt happy hiding in the internet and he said yes, it was his home. On a good day it is the bright field that contains all souls but on a bad day it is the final darkness, where misery is gapingly exposed.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, The Secret Life: Three True Stories

“No feeling is final.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, “What? I’m not doing anything.”
― Jade Sharma, Problems

“To be awake is to be available to torment, and this is the full complete meaning of life.”
― Patrick McGrath, Spider

“She understood it was an opportunity, one of those rare moments when you get a chance to do something bold and risky. When you’re young, these moments happen all the time – weekly, daily – and you assume they’re part of life; but over time they become intermittent, and eventually they peter out altogether. Then you see them happening to your children.”
― Harriet Lane, Other People's Fun