Brian > Brian's Quotes

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn't love me - I felt the wash of her love every day, pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Mr. Frimpong is the oldest person from church. That's when I knew why he sings louder than anybody else: it's because he's been waiting the longest for God to answer. He thinks God has forgotten him. I only knew it then. Then I loved him but it was too late to go back.”
― Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English

“A library is infinity under a roof.”
― Gail Carson Levine

“That's when Poppy kissed me. I didn't have time to get ready. She just kissed me there and then, right on the lips. It felt lovely. I wasn't even scared this time. It was warm and not too wet. I didn't get any tongue. Her breath smelled like Orange Tic Tacs.”
― Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Where did everyone find the will to do all the work in the world? We're all allowed a kind of grace period, she decided, when we can coast along, before we really need to choose a life and summon the determination to live it. Her grace period had just run out.”
― Alethea Black, I Knew You'd Be Lovely: Stories

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Lovers alone wear sunlight.”
― E.E. Cummings

“Stories are wild creatures, the monster said. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Marrying Cal, the scion of a family whose wealth dated to the Industrial Revolution and had multiplied through every turn of the American economy since, ought to have eased her worries about failing to climb as high as she believed she deserved. But the money was his, not theirs. The unspoken power this gave him kept her from asking: Why don't you stay home?”
― Amy Waldman, The Submission

“Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.”
― Amy Waldman, The Submission

“Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. ”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I'd never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

“That's what was wrong with drinking too much. You became immune to drunken delights. There was no solace in liquor. Before you got happy, you collapsed.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend and Other Stories

“But it was hard to keep his hands still. He could almost feel them twitching emphatically with his strong desire to reach out and stroke the dog's head. He had such a terrible yearning to love something again, and the dog was such a beautiful ugly dog.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend and Other Stories

“In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last. And understanding it seemed to give him a sort of quiet peace, a sense of having spread all the cards on his mental table, examined them, and settled conclusively on the desired hand.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend and Other Stories

“He thought about that visionary lady. To die, he thought, never knowing the fierce joy and attendant comfort of a loved one's embrace. To sink into that hideous coma, to sink then into death and, perhaps, return to sterile, awful wanderings. All without knowing what it was to love and be loved.

That was a tragedy more terrible than becoming a vampire.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend and Other Stories

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.”
― Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.”
― Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake