Laura > Laura's Quotes

“This is a hell of dull talk... How about some of that champagne?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightened night when the sounds of the nighttime outside are drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear -- a tiny rehearsal, though you do not know it yet, of what will eventually happen for good -- time holds still, and you can feel, through closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters. And Sara would give her right leg and her left just to live through that moment one more time.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion....if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I've discovered in life. And you can have it, since it's been of no use to me.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“—I probably shouldn’t tell you this, I said.
—Kay-Kay, those are my six favorite words in the English language.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Pass the damn ham, please.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Advice for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart … it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“My Seryozha. My holy little fool. You've spent these last few years working so hard to become an asshole. Despite your best efforts, you're becoming a man instead. And I know you want to become so great an asshole that centuries from now people will speak of wiping their Sergeis. But you're not an asshole. You're my son. So when you want to disgrace yourself, remember, little one, that you are all of your father's pride.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“I've had this pain. To tell you it will go away would be a lie. It will never go away. But, if you live long enough, it will cease to torture and will instead flavor you. As we rely on the bitterness of strong tea to wake us, this too will become something you can use.”
― Eli Brown, Cinnamon and Gunpowder

“Thank you for being open to another more workable draft of me. It affected me profoundly.”
― Mary-Louise Parker, Dear Mr. You

“[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole.”
― Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“I am not promiscuous with my warmth, but when I share it, my warmth can be as hot as the sun.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now.”
― Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn

“That's sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Shanghai and Beijing society would come to accept her, especially if she carries a different handbag.”
― Kevin Kwan, China Rich Girlfriend

“Raccoons are beyond fear, and they are assholes.”
― John Hodgman, Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

“My cairns were obvious, pretentious, rococo.”
― John Hodgman, Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

“We are all migrants through time.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West