Don > Don's Quotes

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
― Walt Whitman

“He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).”
― Roberto Bolaño

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”
― Arthur Miller, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
― Arthur Miller, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

“You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.”
― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”
― Michael Chabon

“I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. ”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.”
― Don DeLillo

“Facts are lonely things”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. 
He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. 
This is one of the essential images in American mythology.”
― Don DeLillo

“He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.”
― Don Delillo

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

from “Araby”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”
― James Joyce

“For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers.”
― James Joyce, The Dead

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”
― Henry Stanley Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
― Henry David Thoreau