Andres Chavez > Andres's Quotes

“But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Nature has no regard for those who squirm and crawl within its tainted depths. The storm that batters, batters all. None are spared. Not you, not I, not the stars in the sky. We bind our cloaks and bend our heads and focus on our lives. But the storm, it never breaks, never fades.”
― Christopher Paolini, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished, they say.
Actually, the family will be just fine, as has always been the case since the dawn of time, while it's the writer who'll meet with a terrible fate in the desperate attempt to kill off mothers, fathers, and siblings, only to once again find them inexorably alive.”
― Veronica Raimo

“Love is never any better than the lover.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“That's an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don't want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”
― Fredrik Backman (Author), Anxious People

“you asked him, he could only say he loved her, and that he did not know what that word meant before her, and that he would forget what it meant after her.”
― Robert Brockway, Kill All Angels: The Vicious Circuit, Book Three

“I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“How unhappy are they who have a gift that's left to germinate in darkness. The pale plant will sink invisible roots and live whitely off their blood.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall On Your Knees

“It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“You see, a conflict always begins with an issue--a difference of opinion, an argument. But by the time it turns into a war, the issue doesn't matter anymore, because now it's about one thing and one thing only: how much each side hates the other.”
― Neal Shusterman, Unwind

“Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word-our tragedy.

"The question of accumulation," Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack-there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“After all, what exactly is a family, if not a brotherhood and sisterhood afflicted with the same terminal disease?”
― Eric LaRocca, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“I have known death all my life. I fear it, course. But it is familiar. Death is a stray dog I have taken in and fed, not because I love it but because I don't want it biting me out of hunger.”
― Jeffrey Cranor, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs

“Life is a tangled knot, years in the making. No one unravels it in one shot.”
― Un-Su Kim

“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“This doesn't mean that the story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories-simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The day may come when policemen and college students aren't natural enemies, but I sure don't expect to live to see it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“In a way, prey are lucky. Running for your life instead of running for your dinner.[...] Better motivation, right?”
― Peter Watts