Cristi Munteanu > Cristi's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“O my friends!- to be queer was very bliss. The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but there young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

“Everything's a risk. Not doing anything is a risk. It's up to you.”
― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything

“Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life's the other way round.”
― David Lodge

“to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing”
― David Lodge, Small World

“I've been in love with you for weeks.'
There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.'
Haven't you ever been in love, then?'
When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.'
What the hell does that mean?'
We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.”
― David Lodge

“Nonetheless, the past is part of your present consciousness—it forms the spectacles through which you experience the present.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying On The Couch

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung