Scott > Scott's Quotes

“The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.”
― Mary Gaitskill, The Other Place

“The thing is you have to fight the whole time. You can't stop. Otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“[The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.]”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“People are more than you think they are. And they’re less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen

“He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.

That’s what my writing was. Messages in bottles.”
― Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault

“There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Le désir, dit-il, c'est avoir quelque chose à gagner, et l'amour quelque chose à perdre.”
― Camille Laurens, Celle que vous croyez

“That’s what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That’s the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you’re alive - the backward ache. That’s what music is.”
― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

“What I have always found most comforting about these forms is the trace of hope I get as I'm filling them out. How they break your life down into such tidy realms, making each seem tractable, because discrete, in a way they never are beyond the white noise of the waiting room. You get that fleeting sense that you're on the verge of being understood, truly and fully, and for the first time, if you could just get it all down in black and white before the receptionist calls your name.”
― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

“The members of Joy Division likely weren’t meditating on Frank Lloyd Wright when they took the stage in Manchester but those flat-fronted black cotton trousers and narrow cut shirts didn’t come from nowhere. Peter Saville, who designed all of Factory’s records, understood in perfectly well: the iconic weight of black and white balanced against the release of splendour, in this case the dark magnificence of the music itself. Which might describe the tension of Protestant affect more generally: all guardedness and restraint until the eruption of an unextirpated beauty wakes us for a moment from the dream of efficiency.”
― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

“Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“I didn't know the cost
of entering a song - was to lose
your way back.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“La felicità non ha mai energia propria, è un riflesso, una sottrazione di infelicità che si comprende solo dopo la stagione del dolore - La casa mangia le parole”
― Luccone Leonardo G.