You or Someone Like You Quotes

“I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“A book is like a person, and one's reaction to a person invariably has more to do with one's own personality and life experience than with the actual person herself.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“They exit one by one, or sometimes two by two. You scatter pieces of them on the snow in the woods and then run away as fast as you can, and then you turn and run back towards them, once they're beyond your reach.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“A snob, incidentally, I tell them, is interested in a person because they are of high class. An elitist is interested in a person because they are interesting. That's the difference.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“Literature is a power, like a foreign language you possess.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“Literature, well done, illustrates the reality of human nature.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You