John

“I’m just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me – my neck, say, or my knee – and I’d carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn’t lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We’d come so close, do you see, that I wouldn’t be surprised out of myself every time you touched.”
― Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”
― James Joyce, The Dead