Erkan Saka > Erkan's Quotes

“Pam replied that she was too old to worry about being cool, but in fact she did worry about it, and that’s one reason it was always nice to see Bobby, who was so uncool as to inhabit—in Pam’s mind—his own private condominium of coolness.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys

“That happens in hotel rooms, people have bad dreams.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys

“No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys

“Jim. If you have any other outside events, don’t confess them. That’s my advice, okay?”“What am I going to do, Bob? I have no family.”“You have family,” Bob said. “You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That’s called family.”Jim fell asleep, his head leaning forward almost to his chest”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys

“He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“Summer has taken a sensuous turn: Ayrs’s wife and I are lovers. Don’t alarm yourself! Only in the carnal sense.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one’s audience with one’s mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it—suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers’ days by forcing ’em to witness a grotesqueness. So I’ll make a thick turban from several towels to muffle the shot and soak up the blood, and do it in the bathtub, so it shouldn’t stain any carpets. Last night I left a letter under the manager’s day-office door—he’ll find it at eight A.M. tomorrow—informing him of the change in my existential status, so with luck an innocent chambermaid will be spared an unpleasant surprise. See, I do think of the little people”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“You are what you leave behind.”
― Greg Bear, City at the End of Time

“In the society of would-be-gods, a humble man is always polite.”
― Greg Bear, City at the End of Time

“Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy. As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way. The appearance of cooperation was worth a great deal, if only because it forced a reciprocity, fair met with fair.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“It is always a starkly private moment when a governor first apprehends his subject as a man—perhaps not as an equal, but at least as a being, irreducible, possessed of frailties, enthusiasms, a real past, and an uncertain future.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“All men want their whores to be unhappy.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“They weren't lying. They firmly believed it all. Which doesn't change the facts.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“Fake it till you make it, he reminds himself. This is how he’s survived Army life so far.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“Okay, so maybe they aren't the greatest generation by anyone's standard, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and all this ceremonial praying is hard on Billy.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he’d keep blinking his eyes after his head was off, for as long as he had consciousness. He blinked seventeen times. That’s a scientist,” Gill said.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others