Charly > Charly's Quotes

“When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.”
― Wallace Stegner, Recapitulation

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“I was two pavements from my destination when somebodey S-s-s-s-s'd at me.
I probably didn't jump twenty feet.”
― Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

“The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”
― Dashiell Hammett

“When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is -- and should be -- your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.”
― Dashiell Hammett

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“The Apricot Ice-cream Disaster had cost a whole evening of my life, compensated for only by the information about simulation algorithms.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project

“I have never heard of the Wife Project. But I’m about to. In detail.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But we should time-share it with pizza-consumption and beer-drinking.’
‘Of course,’ said Rosie”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”
― Jane Austen , Persuasion

“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Isn't it natural that I should belittle all the things I can't offer you?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Even women have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“it is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust.”
― William Shakespeare, Cymbeline