Thomas > Thomas's Quotes

“He uses you as a weapon against himself and not merely because you did. He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others. He thinks of you when the woman lying next to him thinks he's asleep.”
― Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.”
― Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

“We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives”
― John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

“But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.”
― Dennis Lehane, Darkness, Take My Hand

“You were trying to tell me something and I was trying to tell you something else. We didn't trust each other and that was reason enough to make each of us right.”
― Elliot Perlman, The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

“In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.”
― Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

“I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough. ”
― Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island

“There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives.”
― Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.”
― Raymond Chandler

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn't care who knew it.”
― Raymond Chandler

“I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True