Joyce > Joyce's Quotes

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  • #1
    Charles Baxter
    “She has a winning smile. She wins, she always wins.”
    Charles Baxter, The Soul Thief

  • #2
    Jhumpa Lahiri
    “And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made.”
    Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

  • #3
    Kayla Rae Whitaker
    “The less I could do, the more I wanted. Wanted things I couldn’t have and I wanted things I couldn’t even think up yet, but I could feel myself wanting. And that feeling, it’s like itching. Like to drive you crazy.” She shakes her head slightly. “I just wanted and wanted and wanted. You ever felt that way?” “Yes,” I tell her. “I have.” I feel something warm light my chest. It’s maybe the first time in my life that my mother has put something into the right words for me.”
    Kayla Rae Whitaker, The Animators

  • #4
    Adam Thirlwell
    “The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality. But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character, She was going (thought Nigora) to be herself. And yet: how could she? How could she?”
    Adam Thirlwell

  • #5
    Gil Courtemanche
    “You see, each country has a colour, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance."

    "What about Rwanda?"

    "Easy power and impunity. Here, there's total disorder. To someone who has a little money or powere, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who's simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn't have elsewhere.”
    Gil Courtemanche, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
    tags: rwanda

  • #6
    Giles Foden
    “... la kuvunda halian ubani. There is no incense for something rotting. And that is the condition of the world. This I know.”
    Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland
    tags: uganda

  • #7
    Sylvia Plath
    “Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #8
    Chuck Klosterman
    “-- and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like.”
    Chuck Klosterman, The Visible Man

  • #9
    Chuck Klosterman
    “Even the invisible are insecure. It's the most universal problem we have. It's so universal, it might not even count as a problem.”
    Chuck Klosterman, The Visible Man

  • #10
    Samuel Park
    “It occurred to Soo-Ja that if she gave him permission, he'd kiss her right then and there. But she realized that all along, what she really wasn't to have him in the present - how could she, married woman that she was, married man that he was — but to rewrite the past, have him go back in time and create a version that allowed them to kiss. To be able to kiss him did not seem to take much — a step forward, the angling of her face. But, in fact, it required rearranging the molecules of every interaction they had ever had, from the very first day they met.”
    Samuel Park, This Burns My Heart

  • #11
    Abraham   Verghese
    “Ghosh sighed, "I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more, Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
    Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

  • #12
    Lauren Grodstein
    “Everyone who's ever had intentions knows they mean much more than actions do.”
    Lauren Grodstein, A Friend of the Family

  • #13


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