T > T's Quotes

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. ”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“There’s a prison there, too, which always makes me feel included.”
― John Waters, Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

“Actually travel is the opposite of depression. Depression is a curling inward, and travel is an opening outward.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World

“How does one live amongst one’s fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don’t know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can’t tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense, but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed…”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“I know this seems quaint, but back in 2008, Republicans did not consider "demeaning and degrading women" to be senatorial, let alone presidential.”
― Al Franken, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

“the desperation of a mind unable to discipline itself and descending, therefore, into the carnivalesque. A mind imprisoned by itself, serving a life sentence.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“I have gone skiing in a bikini on a wonderful, sunny winter day. It is strange to think that a swimsuit would work in the Alps, when ski boots most certainly don't work when swimming. So what do you keep when you get old? The swimsuit, of course.”
― Margareta Magnusson

“Before he left, he took an ivy leaf from a book that was in his pocket and handed it to me, with greetings from Pentagonia, the kingdom of dark green pentangles. Should we get ourselves a place there? I said of course.”
― Oddný Eir

“[I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“This led me to another gender-related moment: leave it to a group of women to all be able to have a meaningful personal revelation in the space of just seventy-two hours when called upon to do so.”
― Merrrill Markoe

“No whining on the yacht.”
― Al Franken, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.”
― Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“As an Egyptian woman hangs out the wash, she is as alluring as a belly dancer in whose dance the seduction is frank and direct, a sort of invitation to sex. When a woman is hanging out the wash, her appeal is subdued and coy. The woman moves as if unaware of the excitement she arouses in any man watching her. Look. When the woman puts the clothes peg in her mouth and then takes it in her two fingers to peg the wash on the line, the use of the peg is loaded with strong, sensual overtones.”
― Alaa Al Aswany

“I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“calling things by their right names is more than giving them an identity bracelet or a label, or a serial number. We summon a vision. Naming is power.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Or perhaps it was the crying woman's mention of the unread library books, because truly there was nothing sadder, except a gift that a person has hand made for you, a scarf or a poncho, that, try as you might, you cannot ever see your way into wearing. This is when the cold indifference of the world envelops you, and makes you feel invigorated by emotion but also acutely alone.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

“Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying 'What? I'm not doing anything.”
― Jade Sharma

“One of the greatest myths of addiction is that it’s interesting. There is a slight glamour in the beginning, a feeling of doing something wrong, of indulging in a weird world populated by ghosts who used to be struggling musicians but don’t make music anymore, or writers who never write. And then your whole life is getting high and being numb, and there’s absolutely no reason to leave your bed except to get more money. Your life becomes a triangle of elemental needs: get money, get drugs, get home.”
― Jade Sharma, Problems

“Beauty or meaning is not intrinsic too suffering. But if you can take the suffering and find the parts that are funny or profound, you can curate your world into something that might be entertaining for someone for a while. Eventually, maybe, that time will have been useful. More useful than, like, working in a bank.”
― Jade Sharma, Problems