Well Put Quotes

“I reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final gasping fluttering breaths in my palm.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“In the back of my mind I know that this is wrong and I have somewhere I need to be. Like laughing at a joke, then remembering that somebody died. Guilty pleasure.”
― Vikki Wakefield, All I Ever Wanted

“What he was aiming for was nostalgia,
heartache, homesickness. Or stranger yet, the heart’s desire to return to
someplace it had never been. He thought of his own bizarre tendency to
long for other lives; just a few days ago, on the four-lane highway between
Hopwood and Haddington, he’d been passed by a decrepit, fumy old
Cavalier, packed with people. It was an Hispanic family, the father driving
and smoking, the mother looking out the window with a wistful expression
on her face. There must have been four children in the backseat, and two
more between their parents, and for just a moment, Amos couldn’t swallow,
so dearly did he wish to be one of them. This is madness, he had thought,
shaking his head. Who would choose such a life, a life free, as it were, of
choices? Who would want to be one of six impoverished children living in a
foreign and hostile place, squashed into a car with no room to move? And
who on earth would want to be those parents? Amos did, and it wasn’t the
first time. Certain houses caused the same wave of longing—the look of a
particular curtain in an upstairs window, or a bike left on the lawn—and
some movies did it, too. Why? he wanted to ask his congregants. “Why
does this happen to us? Because we have abandoned an infinite number and
variety of pure possibilities, and perhaps they live alongside the choices we
did make, immortalized in the cosmic memory. Perhaps there are unknown
lives walking alongside ours, those paths we didn’t take, and we reach for
them, we ache for them, and don’t know why. We have, none of us, lived
our lives as we ought to have, and maybe that’s a good, working definition
of sin. God doesn’t care, the angels don’t care, no one is mad at us for our
failures. But what agony, to know our better selves, the life we might have
lived is there, just out of reach!”
Amos put down his pen, took off his glasses, pressed his eyes. No, no, it
was all wrong. Possibility, infinity, beauty—none of those words were right.
He was begging for recognition, he was asking his congregation to tell him
they were with him, that they understood this particular knot because it is
the problem of the world, but he knew he couldn’t ask this way. Using
Whitehead was too academic, too circuitous. What he really wanted to say
was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent
hound at the edges of your ruin?”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early

“Certain houses caused the same wave of longing—the look of a particular curtain in an upstairs window, or a bike left on the lawn—and some movies did it, too. Why? he wanted to ask his congregants. “Why
does this happen to us? Because we have abandoned an infinite number and variety of pure possibilities, and perhaps they live alongside the choices we did make, immortalized in the cosmic memory. Perhaps there are unknown lives walking alongside ours, those paths we didn’t take, and we reach for them, we ache for them, and don’t know why.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early