Ed > Ed's Quotes

“There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.”
― Fay Weldon, Chalcot Crescent

“But perhaps revelation often comes when you’re not looking for it, resolution when you don’t realize you need it.”
― Robert Goddard, Past Caring

“Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“But when friends would ask Kathy whether they, too, should start their own business, she talked them out of it. You don’t run the business, she would say. The business runs you.”
― Dave Eggers, Zeitoun

“It seems the older people get, the more shit they ignore. Or, like Dad, they pay attention to stuff that distracts them from the more important things that they’re ignoring.”
― A.S. King, Please Ignore Vera Dietz

“Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of ‘life’. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors – GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE – keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn’t necessarily need to be closed. (from "Skippy Dies")”
― Paul Murray

“As long as it had remained a mystery, I could have dealt with it--no matter how enormous a mystery it became. Now that matters had gotten more specific, my imagination began supplying smells and textures.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake

“I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.”
― Nick Hornby, More Baths, Less Talking

“All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“In the darkness of the bedroom I thought of that, although thinking in the darkness is not advisable: things seem bigger or more serious in the darkness, illnesses more destructive, the presence of evil closer, indifference more intense, solitude more profound.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Other people’s sex lives are a little like other people’s holidays: you’re glad that they had fun but you weren’t there and don’t necessarily want to see the photos.”
― David Nicholls, Us