Trevor > Trevor's Quotes

“Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.

Toast is me.

I am toast.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes

“The more distressing the memory, the more persistent it's presence. ”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“Is where you're from the place you're leaving or where you have roots?”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.”
― Mark Haddon, The Red House

“I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space.
The worst thing is the stupid hopefulness. Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance. That I'm going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking, Oh, yeah. This again.
So I stand on the edge of things, crossing my fingers, praying nobody will try to look me in the eye. And the good thing is, they usually don't.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt

“You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“How much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won’t or can’t love you. As a species we’re pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there’d be no more sexual torment. Better plan – make it cyclical and also inevitable, as in the other mammals. You’d never want someone you couldn’t have.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“And he couldn't stand to be nothing, to know himself to be nothing. He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Being born's a hell of a lottery.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“She doesn't know about metaphors but she knows that even the smallest human vessel has boundless storage for sorrow.”
― Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“She leaves parts of herself unnamed and unexamined, and then he will name them, and she will see herself clearly in his words and hate herself.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“Hold tight to the world and do not let go and do not fuck this up.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“There is nothing as frustrating as being consumed with rage over someone and knowing that you aren’t even on their mind. You want your enemy to be engaged in a struggle until the death with you. Otherwise you are fighting yourself. I mean we are all essentially only in wars against ourselves, but we don’t like it to be so painfully obvious.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn’t get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.”
― Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

“A memory is its own thing each time it's recalled. It's not absolute. Stories based on actual events often share more with fiction than fact. Both fictions and memories are recalled and retold. They're both forms of stories. Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other. But reality happens only once.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“I’m just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me – my neck, say, or my knee – and I’d carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn’t lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We’d come so close, do you see, that I wouldn’t be surprised out of myself every time you touched.”
― Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys

“The power of words. They weaseled under door crevices and through keyholes. They hooked into invididuals and wormed through generations.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“The cost of loneliness is high, she knows, but the cost of loss is higher.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right, and the next few years are his last? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence--fall in love, have children, buy a house--in the face of all evidence there's no such thing?”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“In Simon’s voice, he heard the siren song of family – how it pulls you despite all sense; how it forces you to discard your convictions, your righteous selfhood, in favor of profound dependence.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“What solitary child hasn’t wished for a twin, Mr. Birdsey? Hasn’t imagined that a double exists somewhere in the world? It’s a hungering for human connection— another way of sheltering oneself against the storm.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man