Neeley > Neeley's Quotes

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
― David Foster Wallace

“The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.”
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.) ”
― Jonathan Franzen

“For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“There was love in that house, but none of us really knew what to do with it.”
― Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers