Amelia > Amelia's Quotes

“This book was born as I was hungry. Let me explain.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“My suffering left me sad and gloomy.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.”
― Emily M. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post

“First the colors.
Then the humans.
That's usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

“My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“History has failed us, but no matter.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“​While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“First, I got myself born.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw