Sid Banerjee > Sid's Quotes

“I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”
― jonathan safran foer

“The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.”
― Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost

“I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.”
― Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost

“Come over the hills and far with me
And be my love in the rain.”
― Robert Frost, Complete Poems Of Robert Frost, 1949

“I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“I was waiting for the longest time, she said. I thought you forgot.

It is hard to forget, I said, when there is such an empty space when you are gone.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“When I first discovered the moon, he said, I gave it a different name. But everyone kept calling it the moon. The real name never caught on.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“Is there a lot of stuff you don't understand? she said & I said pretty much the whole thing & she nodded & said that's what she thought, but it was nice to hear it anyways & we sat there on the porch swing, listening to the wind & growing up together.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“The thought of Christmas overwhelms him. He no longer looks forward to the holiday; he wants only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience makes him feel that he is incontrovertibly, finally, an adult.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri

“She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I might be in love with you." He smiles a little. "I'm waiting until I'm sure to tell you, though.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“A brave man acknowledges the strength of others.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
― J.D. Salinger

“This is a people shooting hat," I said. "I shoot people in this hat.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye