Holly > Holly's Quotes

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America

“Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“I go about things in an oblique way. It's like a sidelong glance. This doesn't mean I don't like the sharp stab of directness—only that what I like more are all the moments, leading up to that moment of directness or that expression of rage . . . how long rage was silenced before it exploded and at what cost.”
― Lê Thi Diem Thúy

“She herself vacillated when it came to belief. She did not particularly believe in God. Or, rather, she didn't believe in a particular God. Nevertheless, she kept an open mind. She was not a melancholy agnostic, but the optimistic kind. She liked to give God the benefit of the doubt.”
― Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

“Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.”
― Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

“What do you think I'm going to do?" she asked him.
"Whatever it is," he answered, "I think you'll be terrified when it happens. Don't let that stop you.”
― Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

“Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days

“He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.”
― James Salter, All That Is

“I have said that I cannot explain my desire for her, and it is true. I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

“I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator

“That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator

“It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.”
― Lois Lowry

“Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none”
― Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

“I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.”
― Margaret Mead

“One eye sees, the other feels.”
― Paul Klee

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“It meant that Diana had not waited for any explanation, however halting and imperfect, but had condemned him unheard; and this showed a much harder, far less affectionate woman than the Diana he had known or had thought he knew - a mythical person, no doubt created by himself. It had of course been evident from her letter, which made no reference to his; but he had not chosen to see the evidence and now it was absolutely forced upon his sight it made his eyes sting and tingle again. And deprived of his myth he felt extraordinarily lonely.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Reverse of the Medal

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
― audre lorde

“Denton struck Charley as the kind of man who never wasted energy on extra movement or idle chitchat. He was foursquare Sonny Boy Williamson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Silvertone guitar, older than old school.”
― Natalie Baszile, Queen Sugar

“The priest motioned for the congrecation to sit, then welcomed everyone in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He wasn't so much thin as soft, with wisps of dull brown hair and oversize glasses that made him look gooberish. As he shook holy water over a bundle of cane stalks leaning against the wall, Charley wondered if his blessing would be powerful enough, because from where she sat, it looked like he'd have trouble asking for extra mayo on his sandwich.”
― Natalie Baszile, Queen Sugar

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature