Tracee > Tracee's Quotes

“Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Man is broad, too broad, indeed. I'd have him narrower.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I threw it down the air shaft. There's a concrete floor below.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Lost are we, and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.”
― David Foster Wallace