Jay > Jay's Quotes

“That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty”
― David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

“I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference."
― Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, (from "Mates")”
― Edith Pearlman

“Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.”
― William H. Gass

“And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“But that's life. That's what you learn from; when things happen. Especially at your age. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“A blast, an acceleration, the distillate, the spirit, the history, the weaponized soul of convulsive beauty went critical.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encourageing it. I'm tired of the violence that's on it's way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body's smoothe, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot yourself all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift, reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infinitely.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“Let me make one thing clear: this theory that the universe, after having reached an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again has never convinced me. And yet many of us are counting only on that, continually making plans for the time when we’ll all be back there again.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past.”
― Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth

“There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle—the human heart is content when distracted by war.

“The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins.”
― Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman of Bohemia

“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Later, I could get that drizzle feeling just about any time I saw a kid on a swing. The hopelessness of it—the forward excitement, the midflight return. The futile belief that the next time around, the next flight forward, you wouldn’t get dragged back again. You wouldn’t have to start over, and over.”
― Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

“I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Do not, do not, do not books for ever
hammer at people like perpetual bells?
When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.”
― Sam Lipsyte