~ > ~'s Quotes

“I'm not a bad guy. If only I could stop hoping. If only I could say to my heart: Give up. Be alone forever. There's always opera. There's angel-food cake and neighborhood children caroling, and the look of autumn leaves on a wet roof. But no. My heart's some kind of idiotic fishing bobber.”
― George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“Books are not life, however much we may wish they were”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst - be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark - you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment?”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“The girl Dora might be water, but his Betty is oil. You can't take oil lightly. It seeps into your skin. It marks you.”
― Carrie Tiffany, Mateship With Birds

“Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“He had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him every time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?
You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Dreams belong to each of us alone, just as pain does.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

“And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Yu come face to face with love, and before the sun sets you've become someone you didn't used to be...

It's the reason a wolf would chase a crow, even knowing he can't fly and she don't ever need to touch the ground.”
― Jonathan Hickman, East of West, Vol. 1: The Promise

“On the way up Telopea Avenue she picked a rose off a tree and asked me why I didn't think to pick it off and give it to her.
'I simply didn't notice the plant,' I said.
She picked the petals off the thing as we walked, leaving a melodramatic trail of broken romance behind us.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“Family and friends, as a notion, were a warped insinuation of a living death, and beleiving this had lead me here, to face a life without it.”
― Brendan Cowell, How It Feels

“A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk—always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“There had been options, before the baby, but none of them had been pursued... I had been quiet when there was no reason to be quiet, consisten when consistency didn't matter. For the last twenty years I had lived as if I were taking care of a newborn baby.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“Relax,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with a slow, awkward beginning. The text for the whole relationship, the sustaining mythos, is built in the first few encounters. The whirl of emotions, the push and pull. So the more of this kind of material we generate, the better.”
― Jonathan Lethem

“My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.”
― Jonathan Lethem, As She Climbed Across the Table

“From now on the architects would take over as the high preists of this bourgeois city.”
― Colm Tóibín, Homage to Barcelona

“By day the old area of Barcelona is bustling, full of shouting, hammering, drilling and shutters being pulled up and down. You listen out for sounds.

If you want a replacement gas cylinder you wait for the sound of the delivery man hitting a cylinder with a piece of metal in the street.”
― Colm Tóibín, Homage to Barcelona

“Oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, believe me - there's nothing I'd rather do! I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“I know how tragic it can be to fall for the wrong person. The pain that person can inflict on you when you imagine what it would be like to be with them, the ways you could complement each other. The future you might have together.”
― Chris Womersley, Cairo

“That which interest me above all else,' he wrote,'is the caligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of the grass.”
― Colm Tóibín, Homage to Barcelona

“He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.”
― Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

“Each day he made attempts … but produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work. Nothing sprang free of its own idiom, its own authority, to offer the element of surprise that would be the guarantee of originality.”
― Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

“As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.”
― Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

“Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure