Christine > Christine's Quotes

“Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

“This table is sure to horrify any knowledgeable scholar,”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

“How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

“You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all,”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“What his humanism says to us is that the human subject should stand apart from his or her circumstances emotionally and intellectually, even as he or she experiences the flux of Fortuna—the Chaucerian “job” writ large in a life—and the mesmerizing power of the moment. Only in this can we find our voice.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature;”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece

“wasn’t education a matter of infusing one’s life with flavorful essences, pressing out the impurities, and leaving only a little sludge at the bottom?”
― Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“Why would I wish my senses to be dulled when they could be sharpened? Why would I wish to mumble when I could scintillate? Why would I wish to forget when I could remember? Of course, since even in those days I was a loquacious workaholic who liked to stay up late, you might think I’d pick a drug that would nudge me closer to the center of the bell curve instead of pushing me farther out on the edge—but of course I didn’t. Who does? Don’t we all just keep doing the things that make us even more like ourselves? As I lay in bed with a godawful headache, sunlight streamed through the open window, and so did the smell of good French coffee from the hotel kitchen downstairs.”
― Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“From the masthead one can see a few patches of open water in different directions, but the main outlook is the same scene of desolate hummocky pack.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

“Women who know what they want never want anything interesting.”
― Andrés Neuman, Talking to Ourselves

“I’m having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Pretty soon three sleeping bags formed a triangle in the master bedroom. The father was the hypotenuse. The girl asked him to brush out her hair, which he did while the boy ate a tangerine, peeling it up close to his face, inhaling the mist. Then he held each segment to the light to find seeds. In his lap, cat paws fluttered like dreaming eyes. “What”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“Then it came about that a simple atmospheric variation was sufficient to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me to await the return of a season. For often in one we find a day that has strayed from another, that makes us live in that other, evokes at once and makes us long for its particular pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf torn from another chapter in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece

“there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece

“Night is coming on and I am filled with indescribable loneliness. Felt feverish; bathed in a black, silent stream;”
― John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf