Mandy Shunnarah > Mandy's Quotes

“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too try, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical - because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Mania was a mental state every bit as dangerous as depression. At first, however, it felt like a rush of euphoria. You were completely captivating, completely charming; everybody loved you. You took ridiculous physical risks, jumping out of a third-floor dorm room into a snowbank, for instance. It made you spend your year's fellowship money in five days. It was like having a wild party in your head, a party at which you were the drunken host who refused to let anyone leave, who grabbed people by the collar and said, "Come on. One more!" When those people inevitably did vanish, you went out and found others, anyone and anything to keep the party going. You couldn't stop talking. Everything you said was brilliant. You just had the best idea. Let's drive down to New York! Tonight! Let's climb on top of List and watch the sunrise! Leonard got people to do these things. He led them on incredible escapades. But at some point things began to turn. His mind felt as if it was fizzing over. Words became other words inside his head, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. He kept making puns. No one understood what he was talking about. He became angry, irritable. Now, when he looked at people, who'd been laughing at his jokes an hour earlier, he saw that they were worried, concerned for him. And so he ran off into the night, or day, or night, and found other people to be with, so that the mad party might continue...”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“-Who are you, anyway?
-Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.”
― Billy Collins

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams, Twilight Hours: A Legacy of Verse

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Libraries raised me.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.

[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]”
― Isaac Asimov

“Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.”
― James A. Michener

“To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads."

[American Libraries Magazine, May 28, 2009]”
― Jon Bing

“I hate writing, I love having written.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I want to understand you,
I study your obscure language.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”
― Gabriel García Márquez