Shellty > Shellty's Quotes

“There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“The hours are numerous and the clock seldom measures the time that passes inside us, the real lifetime, and because of this many days can fit into a few hours, and vice versa, and numbers of years can be an imprecise measure of a man's lifetime, he who dies at forty has perhaps actually lived much longer than he who dies at ninety.”
― Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Himnaríki og helvíti

“People with green eyes were close to the fairies, we were told; they were just here for a little while, looking for a human child they could take away. If we ever met anyone with one green and one brown eye we were to cross ourselves, for that was a human child that had been taken over by the fairies. The brown eye was the sign it had been human. When it died, it would go into the fairy mounds that lay behind the Donegal mountains, not to heaven, purgatory, limbo or hell like the rest of us. These strange destinations excited me, especially when a priest came to the house of a dying person to give the last rites, the sacrament of Extreme Unction. That was to stop the person going to hell. Hell was a deep place. You fell into it, turning over and over in mid-air until the blackness sucked you into a great whirlpool of flames and you disappeared forever.”
― Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music and I'll bolt the door.”
― J.D. Salinger, A Boy in France

“I am not happy. I am not unhappy. I am frozen somewhere in the middle that is so much worse. I am nowhere. Nothing is happening and I am getting more and more sad.”
― Samantha Schutz, I Don't Want To Be Crazy

“I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence. The two things don't go together.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves

“You can’t tell me if there are any special subjects to avoid when talking to him, can you?’ ‘Special subjects?’ ‘Well, you know how it is with a stranger. You say it’s a fine day, and he goes all white and tense, because you’ve reminded him that it was on a fine day that his wife eloped with the chauffeur.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves

“Go back? I don’t know. I think hell’s something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go. They’re doing the same things they always did. They’re doing it to themselves. That’s hell.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists

“the thing about books is, there are quite a number you don't have to read.”
― Donald Barthelme, The King

“there is nothing that cannot be made a prison”
― David Ward, I am in Eskew

“Here’s my question. If the ghost wants nothing more than to be witnessed, why would it appear behind you, and not in front of you?
The only answer I can think of is this: it appears behind you because it already knows, to an absolute certainty, that you will have no choice but look back.”
― David Ward, I am in Eskew

“The man is broken.
It’s a strange turn of phrase, now that I come to think about it.
It’s one of those quirks of English, the kind of quiet inexplicable oddity you might not pick up on unless it was the second - or in my case, the third - language you learned.
When we say, “He was attacked,” or, “he was spoken to,” we understand that we’re speaking in the past tense of an attack or a conversation that only happened once.
People don’t stay attacked.
But when we say, “he was broken,” we might be speaking of the past, the singular act of being broken, and but also a present condition, and an inevitable future; a state of brokenness that is everywhere, and deeply felt, and unshakeable.”
― David Ward, I am in Eskew