Alicia > Alicia's Quotes

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful & life was so short.”
― Brian Andreas

“You're the strangest person I ever met, she said & I said you too & we decided we'd know each other a long time.”
― Brian Andreas

“In the end, I think that I will like that we were sitting on the bed, talking & wondering where the time had gone.”
― Brian Andreas

“(existing's tricky:but to live's a gift)”
― E.E. Cummings, Selected Poems

“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard, The Living

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go”
― E.E. Cummings

“What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

"I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.”
― Martin Amis

“Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I just need you to be able to tell people I was here, I felt, I lived and I loved as much as I could, while I could. And that the person that I loved, was you.”
― pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“Of course it’s complicated. If it wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t be interested in you.”
― pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“If a man decides that it is better for him to resist the demands of a present feeble love, in the name of another, of a future manifestation, he deceives either himself or other people, and loves no one but himself. Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
― Seneca

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It