Eileen > Eileen's Quotes

“The train braked. Five-minute stop. The man got off. All very ordinary, of course. But still. Flore came back, passed by me. She touched my arm, returned to her seat. I could have ripped my arm off. You don't need two arms. One good arm, fine, and the other one, the one she'd just touched, in formaldehyde. On the mantelpiece. In my big apartment. When she leaves me.”
― Christian Oster, My Big Apartment

“... while Anne smiled at me with a smile like a caress, and, as we went on up, I surrendered to it, which evoked this other sensation, that I was tripping over the edge, gently but swiftly, like when you fall in a dream, and the world goes with you, you're connected to the world and you take it with you as you fall, wholly accepting the vertiginous abandon.”
― Christian Oster, In the Train

“It happend that Bob referred in front of Paul to the young woman met in Chantilly; it happened that Paul spoke to Bob of the one from the cinema that he'd had so much trouble seeing again. It never occurred to them that these portraits might bear a certain resemblance to each other, and the fact is that they bore none at all.”
― Jean Echenoz, Double Jeopardy

“It left me with an unpleasant feeling as if I had traveled and gone nowhere, and the whole journey was reduced to this impression of pointlessness.”
― Christian Oster, The Unforeseen

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. ”
― Stephen Sondheim

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go--if there are no doors or windows--he walks through a wall.”
― Bernard Malamud

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”
― Peter Shaffer, Five Finger Exercise

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

“Living is a horizontal fall.”
― Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure

“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Et l'amour, où tout est facile,
Où tout est donné dans l'instant;
Il existe au milieu du temps
La possibilité d'une île.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?”
― Virginia Woolf

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”
― James Joyce

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.”
― Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris: The Shooting Script

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin