Panio Gianopoulos > Panio's Quotes

“For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.”
― John Cheever

“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“That sounds great,” Marcus said, trying to marshal enthusiasm, leading with the expression of a desired sentiment and hoping that the sensation might obediently follow. It was a strategy that he had used for most of his life, and it had failed him innumerable times. He didn’t know what it was that tied him to it, what held him fast to this magical idea—even now, after all the pain it had caused recently—that a feeling could be pre- arranged, ordered in advance and then calmly anticipated. One day, surely, it would arrive, like a phone call from a long-absent lover, confiding I miss you, where are you, come home, please, come home.”
― Panio Gianopoulos, A Familiar Beast

“For this decision, too, he had submitted to the overwhelming force of Sharon’s personality, whose longings and needs seemed inalienable rights, whereas Marcus’s were merely whims.”
― Panio Gianopoulos, A Familiar Beast

“The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?”
― James Salter, Light Years

“But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“As I think of it, there’s an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it.”
― James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

“He, too, was an only child. He was as cerebral as he was gossipy. He'd adore and then loathe the same person in less than a week. He was critical of the living, enchanted by the dead, and thought his hands were ugly.”
― Joan Juliet Buck, The Price of Illusion: A Memoir

“Do “superego” and “id” reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? Evolutionary behavioralism and ethology may tell us more about who and how we are as scientific fact, but the poetic concentration of our traits into the personalities of gods, demons, and monsters are easier for some of us dull-witted ones to hold in our heads than the abstractions of science.”
― Stephen Fry, Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined

“When we stop drawing a line between moral failings and evil, between the very things that make us human and those that take away our humanity—when we lose sight of mercy and mistake it for weakness, all is lost.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason