Connie > Connie's Quotes

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory and a slippery hold.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Indeed, thinking of the coffeehouse as a haven for intellectual discourse is difficult when the one in question operates thousands of clones, wants to sell you the latest Coldplay album, and serves five-dollar milkshakes for adults.”
― Taylor Clark, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture

“In one Starbucks, I spotted a young Frenchman wearing blue Converse sneakers, baggy Levi's jeans, and a red T-shirt with a giant Abercrombie & Fitch logo splashed across the front. As I watched him wash down his cheesecake with gulps of venti hot chocolate, I had to wonder: can't they revoke your French citizenship for this sort of thing?”
― Taylor Clark, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.”
― Milan Kundera

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. It's the reason... we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in. - so you can learn. The people around you affect your performance. Choose your crowd wisely.”
― Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development

“Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.

This is how you lose her.”
― Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.”
― Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
― Maurice Sendak

“So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original "intention" had have been.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string. I’d be thinking about one unrelated thing after another. I don’t know, I guess finally I want to be alone a little while longer. And I want to let my thoughts wander freely.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Joe Armstrong: I think the lack of reusablility comes in object-oriented languages, not in functional languages. Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle”
― Peter Seibel

“Armstrong: I like documentation. I don't think a program is finished until you've written some reasonable documentation. And I quite like a specification. I think it's unprofessional these people who say, "What does it do? Read the code." The code shows me what it does. It doesn't show me what it's supposed to do. I think the code is the answer to a problem.”
― Seibel Peter

“I remember the juvenile stuff, where you put your arm along the sofa and let it drop onto her shoulder, or press your leg against hers; I remember the mock-tough adult stuff I used to try when I was in my mid-twenties, where I looked someone in the eye and asked if they wanted to stay the night. But none of that seems appropriate anymore. What do you do when you're old enough to know better?”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved. But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, anger? What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you’re a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes like you always swore you would so that the two of you could dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak—It was the book! It was the pressure!—and every hour like clockwork you say that you’re so so sorry. You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more, and, Ya, and you will have to move from the Harlem apartment that you two have shared. You consider not going. You consider a squat protest. In fact, you say won’t go. But in the end you do.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“Why were we hungry? my stomach cried. Even then I understood that if the rich could only spare all the hungry a bowl of rice, they would be less rich but they would not starve. If the solution was so simple, why was anyone hungry? Was it only a lack of sympathy?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer