Naomi > Naomi's Quotes

“I've learnt something more. The expectation of a body can last as long as any hope. Like mine expecting yours. As soon as they gave you two life sentences, I stopped believing in their time.”
― John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters

“The single word that counted on Wednesday was the one that came from the muzzle of a gun, addressed to somebody on their knees. Better to choose our hour than to accept this. We know each other. We've known each other from the time of Crocodilopolis. [Letter unsent]”
― John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters

“So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out.”
― Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story

“They can't foresee what we intend to do next. This is why they lose their nerve. They can't cross the zone of silence they herd us into. A zone bordered on their side by the distant din of their false accusations, and on our side by our silent final intentions.”
― John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters

“But didn't you say you were satisfied with your life?"

"Word games," I dismissed. "Every army needs a flag.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“No place for illusions here. The beat doesn't stop solitude, it doesn't cure pain, you can't telephone it - it's simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story.”
― John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters

“All right, she thought I was a funny little geezer, but my charred Phaethon had impressed her, I was very obviously available, and she was out for revenge. What makes Greek tragedies great is that this brand of psychological nonsense doesn't enter into it at all. I had wanted to tell her that too, but unfortunately conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say. We are descendents, we do not have mythical lives, but psychological ones. And we know everything, we are always our own chorus.”
― Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.”
― George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950

“Properly speaking, should any individual ever have exact, clear knowledge of his own core consciousness?"
"I wouldn't know," I said.
"Nor would we," said the scientists.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“I've provisionally left off any more hasty decision. The only thing that interests me at the moment is the slow complicity of correspondence. I read to myself the letters which I'm going to send: 'Pardon the rhetoric. Just some nonsense to disguise the tenderness'.”
― Ana Cristina Cesar

“What kind of a world do we live in that has room for dog yoga but not for Esperanto?”
― Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language

“I am having a quarter-life crisis," I announced to my mother.

"My generation never had those, we just had babies and thought about killing them from time to time.”
― Zoe Whittall, Holding Still for as Long as Possible

“Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.”
― Glen Duncan, Talulla Rising

“I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?”
― Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

“There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“She revisited sex now as a ruined project she couldn't entirely give up on.”
― Glen Duncan, A Day and a Night and a Day

“This would be my torture: all that didn't bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“Embrace determinism and you're chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“There’s no story that’s the start of itself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”
― jonathan safran foer

“What you risk reveals what you value.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“I don’t understand. She’s always been so friendly toward me.”

“Yes, so long as your work consisted of updating calendars and photocopying golf club bylaws.”

“But there was no danger of my taking her place!”

“She was never afraid of that.”

“Then why denounce me? Why would it upset her if I went to work for you?”

“Miss Mori struggled for years to get the job she has now. She probably found it unbearable for you to get that sort of promotion after being with the company only ten weeks.”

“I can’t believe it. That’s just so … mean.”

“All I can say is that she suffered greatly during the first few years she was here.”

“So she wants me to suffer the same fate? It’s too pathetic. I must talk to her.”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

“Of course. How else are we going to work things out if we don’t talk?”

“You just talked to Mister Omochi. Does it strike you that things have been worked out?”
― Amélie Nothomb, Stupeur et tremblements

“Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“all that a world could be, no matter what,

is, somewhere, in some way.

fullness of possibles, consistency.

no matter which talking head, mine

for example, adjacent to my body

and

why not

against my face, the angel's, the black shadow face itself,

but all the seats are taken, all the worlds

unavailable

to you.”
― Jacques Roubaud, Plurality of Worlds of Lewis

“I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

“He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years.”
― Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned