Guy > Guy's Quotes

“Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people - those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food;”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse

“Yet in recent years I have witnessed a new phenomenon among filmgoers, especially those considered intelligent and perceptive. I have a name for this phenomenon: the Instant White-out. People are closeted in cozy darkness; they turn off their mobile phones and willingly give themselves, for ninety minutes or two hours, to a new film that got a fourstar rating in the newspaper. They follow the pictures and the plot, understand what is spoken either in the original tongue or via dubbing or subtitles, enjoy lush locations and clever scenes, and even if they find the story superficial or preposterous, it is not enough to pry them from their seats and make them leave the theatre in the middle of the show.
But something strange happens. After a short while, a week or two, sometimes even less, the film is whitened out, erased, as if it never happened. They can’t remember its name, or who the actors were, or the plot. The movie fades into the darkness of the movie house, and what remains is at most a ticket stub left accidentally in one’s pocket.”
― Abraham B. Yehoshua, The Retrospective

“Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it's no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it's time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.”
― Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary

“When a man's over head and shoulders in debt, he may live the faster for it, and the better if he goes the right way about it, or else how is it so many live so well, as we see every day after they are ruined?”
― Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent

“When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark

“Poets treat their experiences shamelessly: they exploit them”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Is there such depravity in man as that he should injure another without benefit to himself?”
― Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

“At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.”
― Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object

“Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.”
― Russell Banks, Success Stories: Astute and Forceful Moral Fables of Greed, Violence, and Upward Mobility

“It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.”
― Russell Banks, Trailerpark

“Only in adulthood can any intelligent understanding of the meaning of one's existence in this world be gained from one's experiences in it.”
― Bruno Bettleheim

“I was afraid of the consequences of my acts in the right way, beyond guilt, but it was too late. I'd already become the person I should have been afraid of becoming.”
― Russell Banks, Success Stories: Astute and Forceful Moral Fables of Greed, Violence, and Upward Mobility

“As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I know writers like to think of themselves as bohemians,' he said, 'but that doesn't mean they can't behave like decent human beings.”
― Gert Loveday, Writing is Easy

“That's why he preferred young women. So much easier to impress. Although these days he often found them as rude and forthright as their older sisters. God were women worth it?”
― Gert Loveday, Writing is Easy

“I looked at her. She wore a very tight and tiny two-piece orange bathing swimsuit that inadequately covered the overplump body I'd been using as a forget-yourself machine.”
― Gil Brewer, Nude on Thin Ice / Memory of Passion

“She was like steel. It was in her eyes, and in her voice, and in the fine, shining look of her. From the sparkling ankles to the expensive-crink of a hat. She looked sexy and untouchable, the way they can look if they want. She looked expensive.”
― Gil Brewer, Nude on Thin Ice / Memory of Passion

“She looked slick as hell; polished, neat, and with that feminine deadliness that can drive you nuts. They work on it till they get complete control of the situation. There's no use trying to break them down. They've made it.”
― Gil Brewer

“What have I kept of Rae Evans from the moment when she half stood behind her desk and held out her hand to shake mine? I think it is the impression of white--white face, white shirt between two halves of a power dark suit. Hers were night colors, and though it was early in the morning, and she was my new boss, it seemed as though the business day had not quite caught up to us, and maybe never would.”
― Dorothy Johnston, The Trojan Dog

“That night I experienced one of those sudden, unpleasant shifts of perception that occur to parents, when you notice a difference in your child that's been coming over a long time, and you're faced with it, and at the same time you're groping back to touch the child they were a minute ago, while a somehow unaccountable, unpredictable person is watching you, waiting for you to catch up with them, contemptuous because you haven't.”
― Dorothy Johnston, The Trojan Dog

“In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.”
― Émile Zola, The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories

“If we lived forever, there would be time to recover from mistakes of twenty years duration.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“You can admire the way someone meets hard circumstances, but you can't admire him because of them.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“Perhaps this was part of growing older, to undergo hideous alterations in the deepest certainties, in love, in lovers, finally in one's self.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“I was attracted to the strangeness of his mind as a psychiatrist might have been drawn to an interesting case. he wanted a resident analyst. Neither of us understood.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“But sooner or later people have to take up their own lives, not disperse them out as though they were knitting wool that a clever knitter might handle better.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“I can't see the world as a great hospital with us all nursing and pitying each other.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions.”
― Antonio Tabucchi

“personally I don't trust literature that soothes people's consciences.”
― Antonio Tabucchi, Requiem: A Hallucination

“You construct a ladder and you climb that ladder, out of the hell you have constructed for yourself and back into the real world.”
― barracuda