Bob > Bob's Quotes

“The greater their likeness to each other, the more unlike they are to me.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“She felt like fastening little labels on the furniture: Lady Louise Carrington Lounge Chair, Last used August 1923. Not for the benefit of posterity: but to remove her own self into another world, another realm of existence.”
― D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr / The Man Who Died

“He is full of purpose, but void of the quality of mind which accomplishes purpose.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge on Shakespeare

“Biologically developed to be conscious of our existence, we treat our perceived identities and the identity of the world around us as if they required a literate decipherment, as if everything in the universe were represented in a code that we are supposed to learn and understand. Human societies are based on this assumption: that we are, up to a point, capable of understanding the world in which we live.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor

“I could see into the kitchen from where I sat. A black bug, maybe a cockroach, was crawling around on the dirty dishes piled in the sink. Lilly talked on as she wiped peach juice off her bare thighs. She dangled a slipper from one foot, in which I could see the red and blue blood vessels. I always think these are lovely, seen through the skin.”
― Ryū Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue

“The tomatoes were wet and wonderfully red in the darkness.They flashed on and off like the little light bulbs on fir trees or around windows at Christmas time. The numberless trembling red fruits, trailing sparks, were just like fish with luminous teeth swimming in the dark sea.”
― Ryū Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue

“There's a special dispensation in the sensuousness of an unshared bed, at least for a while, until sleeping alone begins to assume its own quiet sadness.”
― Ian McEwan, Machines like Me

“Sometimes, a preconceived opinion will make us overlook the obvious. This is a frightening thing. We call it common sense but it often leaves us with a blind spot. Even if something appears to be obvious one should investigate, objectively, to make absolutely sure.”
― Seichō Matsumoto, Tokyo Express

“And yet in my experience a certain amount of daily maintenance work on the interior of the nose was necessary, physically necessary, simply to avoid panicky feelings of claustrophobia, especially in the dry winter months. Those high hardened ridges had to be removed.”
― Nicholson Baker, Room Temperature

“I sat at my ease, even somnolently, as I steered with one finger and slowly drove through Berlin, down quiet, cold, whispering streets; and so it went on and on, until I noticed that I had left Berlin behind. The colors of the day were reduced to a mere two: black (the pattern of the bare trees, the asphalt) and whitish (the sky, the patches of snow). It continued, my sleepy transportation.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

“That night, in the strange stealthily deepening darkness, under the lindens of that spacious public park, on a stone slab sunk deep in moss, Ganin in the course of one brief tryst grew to love her more poignantly than before and fell out of love with her, as it seemed then, forever.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Mary

“The palms of her hands were like a damp Sunday and she wore a cross round her neck where a tiny raisin of flesh, a coagulated but still transparent bubble of dove's blood, seemed always in danger of being sliced off by that thin gold chain.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“[...] your mistress, in comparison with mine, is as a glow-worm to the meridian sun, a rush-light to the full moon, or a stale mackarel's eye to a pearl of orient.”
― Tobias Smollett, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves

“To be fine, fingers must be long and slender and yet provided with flesh soft enough to keep their delicate shape. Each finger must differ slightly from another, yet there must be harmony between them as a whole. There are fewer people with beautiful fingers than people with beautiful faces.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Nowaki

“A sludgy, psychedelic rhythm poured out of the speakers, the slowest, sludgiest rhythm Carl had ever heard, like a hypnotized dinosaur stomping unknowingly over flower children and a meadow full of butterflies in a gently rolling landscape. Above the proceedings opened up a sky filled with the suns of a million spotlights and out of those heights came the falsetto voice of Marshal Mellow, naked and featherless, squawking as it flitted downward, a tiny, prehistoric bird landing on the dinosaur's neck and tossed around.”
― Wolfgang Herrndorf, Sand

“The sodden crescent at the edge of my long-since-dunked digestive biscuit flotched to the desk top like excrement.”
― Will Self, The Quantity Theory of Insanity

“The professor would tell Tekla that the feeding of pigeons meant the same to him as going to church or the synagogue. God is not hungry for praise, but the pigeons wait each day from sunrise to be fed. There is no better way to serve the Creator than to be kind to his creatures.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories

“Think of you! To think of a whirlwind, though 'twere in a whirlwind, were a case of more steady contemplation : a very tranquillity of mind and mansion. A fellow that lives in a windmill has not a more whimsical dwelling than the heart of a man that is lodged in a woman.”
― William Congreve, The Way of the World