Somewhere Over the Sun

A collection of quotations and favorite passages from books and sometimes movies. This is me in other people’s words. 

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of what I am supposed to do, which is write- on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my note book and there it will all be…a forgotten account with accumulated interest” –Joan Didion

“Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”- Joan Didion

“We are brought up in ethic that others, any others, all others are by definition more interesting than ourselves” –Joan Didion

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” –Joan Didion

“You see, I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present…”- Joan Didion

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed- Alexander Pope

“i mean, isn’t it odd - how you can buy a lap dance, phone sex, or blowjob in a snap, but can’t pay a person a dollar to just sit next to you on a park bench and simply hold your hand!”

~jeffrey mcdaniel

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

                At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.” –The Blind Assassin, p. 98, Margaret Atwood

“People cry at wedding for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible. But I was beyond such childishness; I was breathing the high bleak air of disillusionment, or thought I was.” –The Blind Assassin, p. 245

“The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.” –The Blind Assassin, p.263

The honesty, brutal honesty, of words that could’ve meant something to someone when they mean nothing to you- Robert Smith

How many people do you know can stand before a crying soul and actually give a damn?  Robert Smith

“Anna Sergeyovna was an odd enough person. Free from all prejudice, she yet lacked strong convictions; and though she was not put off by obstacles, she had no goal in life. She had clear ideas about many things and a variety of interests, but nothing ever fully satisfied her; nor did she seek complete satisfaction. Her mind was at once probing and apathetic: any doubts she may have entertained were never banished to the point of oblivion; nor were they ever allowed to provoke a state of inner alarm. If she had not been rich and independent, she might have thrown herself into the battle of life, experienced passion….But she had an easy life, boring as it may sometimes have been, and continued to pursue her daily round without haste or undue agitation. From time to time a rainbow would loom in her sky, but when the mirage had faded she rediscovered peace and did not pine. Her imagination ranged beyond the bounds of what was considered permissible by the laws of conventional morality, but even then the rhythm of her blood pulsed no quicker as it circulated through her magnificently proportioned and tranquil body. Sometimes, energy all warm and languorous from a fragrant bath, she would begin to muse on the insignificance of life, its sorrows, labors and evils…Her soul would be filled with sudden resolve and would seethe with noble ardor; but a drought from a slightly open window was enough to make her shrink, complain, and almost be angry; in a moment like that her most urgent desire was to prevent the horrid drought from blowing on her. Like all the women who had failed to fall in love, she experienced a yearning for something she could not define. In reality, she yearned for nothing, although she seemed to long for everything.” –Fathers and Sons, pg. 92-93

“Time, as we all know, is sometimes a bird on the wing, and sometimes a crawling worm; but men are happiest when oblivious of time’s quick or slow pace.” P. 94

“There are plenty of memories, but nothing to remember.” P. 102

“I keep racking my brains: now here I am lying under this hayrick…The confined space I occupy is so minute when compared with the rest of the universe, where I am not and have no business to be; and the fraction of time I shall live is so infinitesimal when contrasted with eternity, in which I have never been and never shall be…And yet here, in this atom of myself, in this mathematical point, blood circulates, the brain is active, aspiring to something too…. What a monstrous thing! How absurd it seems!”

“Just think about what a novel is. About the multitude of different characters. Are you trying to make us believe that you know all about them? That you know what they look like, what they think, how they’re dressed, what kind of family they come from? Admit it, you’re not interested in any of that!”

“ ‘The novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?’

‘Nothing,’ said Bibi…

‘All anyone can do is give a report on oneself. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie.”

The book of laughter and forgetting- Milan Kundera p. 124

“I often have the impression my whole body is filled with the desire to express itself. To speak. To make itself heard. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy, because I’m so bursting with it I have an urge to scream…I want to express my life and my feelings, which I know are absolutely original, but when I sit down in front of a piece of paper, I suddenly don’t know anymore what to write.”

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting- Milan Kundera p. 125

“(Yes, I realize you don’t know what I’m talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise- the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music- we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.)”  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting- Milan Kundera p. 144

You find a glimmer of happiness in this world, there’s always someone who wants to destroy it.- Finding Neverland

How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.- Choke, Chuck Palahniuk

‘Sobriety is okay enough,’ Denny says, ‘ but someday, I’d like to lead a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff.’-choke

“My generation, all of our making fun of things isn’t making the world any better,” she says. “We’ve spent so much time judging what other people created that we’ve created very, very little of our own…I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation.” – Choke

“The theater of the mind. The bordello of the subconscious.”- Choke

“Nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.”- Choke

“Everybody wants more excitement from their life than they’ll ever get…they get what they want, plus a good story to tell. An experience.”- Choke

“Sometimes a euphemism is more true than what it’s supposed to hide.” –Choke

“Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can’t be explained and understood.”- Choke

“People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren’t going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there’s no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we’re left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.”-Choke

“It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it’s for sure unexplainable. Even God.” –Choke

“The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!”- Cat’s Cradle

‘“The highest possible form of treason…is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.”

“I guess Americans are hated a lot of places.”

“People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty.”- Cat’s Cradle

“‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the stilt of tomorrow.” -Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important.” - Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

“Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere”- Zen…

Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death, when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations, and some of the words and expressions I use normally will seem outdated and of ambiguous meaning. In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammer, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world’s intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things.

From “If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler”

“For every mad scientist who’s had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is finished and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who’ve sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime.” –Good Omens

Notoriety wasn’t as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity”- Good Omens

“Newt’s car was a Wasabi. He called it Dick Turpin, in the hope that one day someone would ask him why.”- Good Omens

“You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s all full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hangin’ about for millions of years. ‘Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion.”- Good Omens

“You have to carefully clothe with words what’s lurking behind them and because a few words read by others are enough to become the wrong words.” –Whore

“He likes to think that we live under the reign of evil and so on, that life down here will never be a life but an ordeal, a relentless battle against a thousand vices that have to be denounced, yes, intense suffering is necessary or the idea of paradise won’t be as beautiful…”- Whore

“He’s too specialized, too focused on what he hears behind what I’m saying…”- Whore

“So I talk about everything and nothing, because the rule is free association, whatever comes into my mind, and what is free association exactly, I don’t know, nobody does, since in this kind of treatment nobody knows anything about anything…” –Whore

“I hate whining when I’d like to sparkle, but here I am, still at it, wanting to seem beautiful in what I say.” Whore

“If this was the only life he’d ever tasted, who was he to judge whether it was rich or poor in the stuff that makes life worth living?”- Timbuktu, Paul Auster

That’s all I’ve ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab, humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.”- Timbuktu, Paul Auster

“For Mr. Bones, Henry proved that love was not a quantifiable substance. There was always more of it somewhere, and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another.”- Timbuktu, Paul Auster

“It was the first time since his master’s death that he had been able to think about such things without feeling crushed by sorrow, the first time he had understood that memory was a place, a real place that one could visit, and that to spend a few moments among the dead was not necessarily bad for you, that it could in fact be a source of great comfort and happiness.”- Timbuktu, Paul Auster

“The world was filled with such wonders, and it was a sad state of affairs when a man spent his time worrying about the wrong things” - Timbuktu, Paul Auster

“Sometimes, you just have to bow down in awe. A person comes up with an idea that no one has ever thought of, an idea so simple and perfect that you wonder how the world ever managed to survive without it.” - Timbuktu, Paul Auster

“It’s not easy doing good works. There’s no profit in it. And when there’s no money in a thing, people tend to get confused. They think you’re up to something, even when you’re not.” - Timbuktu, Paul Auster

“Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, just remember that you’re not the first dog who’s ever been lost.” - Timbuktu, Paul Auster

“And if he had been to Timbuktu once, was it too much to think that he might not be able to go there again – simply by closing his eyes and chancing upon the right dream? It was impossible to say. But there was comfort in that thought, just as there had been comfort in spending that time with his old friend, even if none of it had really happened, even if none of it would ever happen again.” - Timbuktu, Paul Auster

“Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise- and these were Willy’s exact words- why bother to go on living?” - Timbuktu, Paul Auster

[He’d] walked home tender-skinned and humbled by the beauty of pavement and sky, his liberty to notice them.” –Death of an Ordinary Man, Glenn Duncan

Gina took a sip, swallowed, remembered she used to have to make a face to get the stuff down, suddenly thought of herself as old, knew it was absurd, but people dying compressed time, dog years. Eighteen. What’s eighteen sevens?” – Death of an Ordinary Man

“That’s the problem with being alive,’ she says, staring at the floor. ‘You’ve got to keep thinking of what to do.’”- Death of an Ordinary Man

You’re woken prematurely from a delicious dream so you go back into sleep to finish it. But there’s something else there instead. You don’t choose the dream, the dream chooses you.”- Death of an Ordinary Man

Either everything meant something or nothing did, except that was just one of those things that sounded more profound than it was.” - Death of an Ordinary Man

“If you were buried alive maybe you’d spend your last air singing a song or whistling a tune.” - Death of an Ordinary Man

It’s the indifference to the world. The otherness. The brazen involvement with the mystery of herself.” - Death of an Ordinary Man

“Before her he’d been ghostly. A center of self barely worthy of the name. He’d read books, passed exams, had sex with half a dozen girls, had bizarre dreams and minor religious moments courtesy of clear nights or autumn dusks- but never with a feeling of urgency or actuality, a consciousness of really being in the world, himself, alive, unique. His life might have been all bizarre dreams. Nor had he, particularly, minded. He’d blown around, more or less a person, more or less continuous. He’d had a terrible tendency to assume other people’s accents, tics or traits. “-Death of an Ordinary Man

“That was the way of it, getting older. The world was either less and less or more and more funny.” –Death of an Ordinary Man, Glen Duncan

“Survival was absurd to the point of hilarity. Every moment a part of you announced: Still here. Still here. Still here. Sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with defiance, sometimes with nothing, just robotic observation.” –Death of an Ordinary Man, Glen Duncan

“He didn’t want to think about need. There’s what you need and there’s what you want, Cheryl had written. There may be a universe out there in which they’re one and the same thing, but it isn’t the universe I live in.” –Death of an Ordinary Man, Glen Duncan

“It was the little pause, the second of rapture before they both burst out laughing, that united them in absolute joy. That moment was the jewel in which time stopped, perfecting everything, including the knowledge that they were young, and that the world hadn’t yet got its hands on them.” –Death of an Ordinary Man, Glen Duncan

“What you needed to do was spend more- much more- of your life sitting still and thinking and not being bothered by anyone. If the millions ever materialized, that’s what she’d do.” - Death of an Ordinary Man, Glen Duncan

“We don’t need much more than this, do we? To have eaten and drunk and taken a few drugs and stayed up all night talking and to be sitting with your best friend at the stereo and your girl resting her head in your lap? How do wars ever get started?” - Death of an Ordinary Man, Glen Duncan

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.” –The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams

For old times’ sake, as never was.” –Wicked, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Gregory Maguire

“I like the sound of the words, but I don’t ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.” –Wicked

“There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.” –Wicked

“He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.” –The Once and Future King, T.H. White

“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.” - The Once and Future King

“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers baser minds.  There is only one thing for it then- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” - The Once and Future King

“Perhaps we all give the best our hearts uncritically- to those who hardly think about us in return.” - The Once and Future King

“Approaching her, he stood for a moment watching her smoke a cigarette. Her sallow face buckled inwards as she inhaled powerfully. It gave him the strange impression that the tobacco was the consumer and she was the depreciating product: with every puff she was being used up. On reflection, he considered, that impression was spot on.” –The Acid House, Snuff, Irvine Welsh

“This is what being alive’s all about, all those fucked-up feelings. You’ve got to have them; when you stop, watch out.” –A Smart Cunt, Irvine Welsh

“Two is the beginning of the end.” – Peter Pan, J.M Barrie

“The queasy feeling induced by too much awareness of life.”- Side Effects, Woody Allen

“Cloquet began to panic. He wanted to run and hide, or, even better, to become something solid and durable- a heavy chair, for instance. A chair has no problems, he thought. It’s there; nobody bothers it. It doesn’t have to pay rent or get involved politically. A chair can never stub its toe or misplace its earmuffs. It doesn’t have to smile or get a haircut, and you never have to worry that if you take it to a party it will suddenly start coughing or make a scene. People just sit in a chair, and then when those people die other people sit in it. Cloquet’s logic comforted him, and when the jailors came at dawn to shave his neck, he pretended to be a chair.” –Side Effects, Woody Allen

“It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly polymorphous. He hated her.” –Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera

“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?− every, every minute?”

−Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn’t nice, what is?” −Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

“Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.” −Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

“We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.” Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

  “It was love clearly or at least what the young so often mistake for love, and frankly, who are we in middle age to say that it isn’t love, that rush of adrenalin and hormones that feels hot and cool at the same time like a frozen creamy cocktail. Why is that not love but yes this companionable settling that we do as life goes on is? Maybe love really is only for the young and the old co-opt it as we do everything and call our watered-down if quite comfortable version the only ‘real’ love. [She} was in love with [him]. I could see it with my own two eyes. Simple. Plain as the nose on your face. Because if the fizz in her voice and behind her smile and in the flush of her skin wasn’t love, then why bother with love at all and not just take whatever it is she has? If [she] wasn’t in love, then love’s been scooped by something that looks far better or at least more fun, is my opinion.” –Topics About Which I Know Nothing, The Motivations of Sally Rae Wentworth, Amazon, Patrick Ness

“At what point does a person become a people?” –Topics About Which I Know Nothing, The Motivations of Sally Rae Wentworth, Amazon, Patrick Ness

“Surely, I am that most worthless of idealists, stuck on the fence, paralysed and useless, unable to act or able to act only in ways that are opposite to what I believe. How do you get here if all the work you do is to not get here?” –Topics About Which I Know Nothing, The Motivations of Sally Rae Wentworth, Amazon, Patrick Ness

“I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.” –The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired’ women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“But then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Woman, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“He was afraid of certainty.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality.” −The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

−The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful. ” −The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play− I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.” −The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

On the drive back they told each other that it had been the wrong time, the wrong place, that it was bad because he had lied to arrange it, that it would be all right another time, idyllic later. – Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

Now I lie in the sun and play solitaire and listen to the sea (the sea is down on the cliff, but I am not allowed to swim, only on Sundays when we are accompanied) and watch a hummingbird. I try not to think of dead things and plumbing… I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the humming bird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m just not crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game? − Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

The larger issue, the one that sends me to the dictionary of philosophy, if I had one, is the idea of acting like myself. Where do my hands go when I’m myself? Are they in my pockets? I frankly can’t remember. I have a tough time just being myself, you know, at parties and such. I start talking to someone and suddenly I know I am no longer myself, that some other self has taken over. The less active the body, the more active the mind. −The Pleasure Of Myself, Steve Martin

For every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherencies. − Library of Babel, Borges

“El sexo es el Consuelo que uno tiene cuando no le alcanza el amor.” −Memoria de mis Putas Tristes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Descubri que mi obsesion de que cada cosa estuviera en su puesto, cada asunto en su tiempo, cada palabra en su estilo, no era el premio merecido de una mente en orden, sino al contrario, todo un sistema de simulacion inventado por mi para ocultar el desorden de mi naturaleza. Descubri que no soy disciplinado por virtud, sino como reaccion contra mi negligencia; que parezco generoso por encubrir mi mezquindad, que me paso de prudente por mal pensado, que soy conciliador para no sucumbir a mis coleras reprimidas, que solo soy punctual para que no se sepa cuan poco me importa el tiempo ajeno.” − Memoria de mis Putas Tristes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“People who meant it were much more likely to kill themselves than people who didn’t.” – About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“The thing was, Will had spent his whole life avoiding real stuff…but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before.” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“No problem was his problem. Very few people were in a position to say they had no problems, but then, that wasn’t his problem either. Will didn’t see this is a source of shame, but as a cause for wild and raucous celebration; to reach the age he had without encountering any serious difficulties seemed to him a record worth preserving.”

About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“You could shut life out. If you didn’t answer the door to it, how was it going to get in?” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn’t even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“Marcus was so locked into himself, so oblivious to everyone and everything, that affection seemed to be the only possible response: the boy somehow seemed to be asking for absolutely nothing and absolutely everything all at the same time.” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“Much later in the day, when common sense prevailed and everyone started squabbling, he learnt that smiling at people didn’t even mean that you had to be friends for a day, but for a few hours he was happy to believe in an inverted universe.” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“In the end, ‘I dunno’ is the only honest answer anyone can give, isn’t it?” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“Life was, after all, like air. Will could have no doubt about that anymore. There seemed to be no way of keeping it out, or at a distance, and all he could do for the moment was live it and breathe it. How people managed to draw it down into their lungs without choking was a mystery to him: it was full of bits. This was air you could almost chew.” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“It seemed that whether you felt something, or whether you felt nothing, it didn’t matter: your responses were off either way.” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“He was not a man given to mystical moments, even under the influence of narcotics, but he was very worried that he was having one now, for some reason.” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“It was funny how you could still know tiny little things about people, like where they kept their tin, even though you didn’t know what they were thinking from one week to the next.” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“There had to be a point to exhibiting things, Will decided. Just because they were old, it didn’t mean they were necessarily interesting. Just because they’d survived didn’t mean you wanted to look at them.” −About a Boy, Nick Hornby

“The hard part in writing a narrative of someone’s life is choosing from the abundance of details and microevents, all of them equally significant, or equally insignificant. If one elects to include only the important events: the births, the deaths, the loves, the humiliations, the uprisings, the ends and the beginnings, one denies the real substance of life: the ephemera, the nethermoments, much too small to be recorded (the train pulling into the station where there is nobody; a spider sliding down an invisible rope and landing on the floor just in time to be stepped on; a pigeon looking straight into your eyes; a tender hiccup of the person standing in front of you in line for bread; an unintelligible word muttered by a one-night stand, sleeping naked and nameless next to you). But you cannot simply list all the moments when the world tickles your senses, only to seep away between your fingers and eyelashes, leaving you alone to tell the story of your life to an audience interested only in the fireworks of universal experiences, the roller coaster rides of sympathy and judgement.” –Nowhere Man, Aleksandar Hemon

“Yet, he was frequently tormented by the doubt that invades the heart of many an artist: that his art, excavated from the deepest recesses of his soul, was just plain shit.” - Nowhere Man, Aleksandar Hemon

“I get a kick out of meeting someone who is a cliché embodied. It produces a pleasant feeling of a world completed, of everything arranging itself without any of my involvement, yet not veering out of control.” Nowhere Man, Aleksandar Hemon

“I’m just upset that the world has gotten too big, way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers.” −Generation X, Douglas Coupland

“Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can’t help but suffer in comparison.” −Generation X, Douglas Coupland

“She breaks the silence by saying that it’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. ‘Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.’” −Generation X, Douglas Coupland

“We spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.” −Generation X, Douglas Coupland

“All looks with strangers became the unspoken question, ‘Are you the stranger who will rescue me?’ Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes.” −Generation X, Douglas Coupland

“Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library− a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.” −Generation X, Douglas Coupland

“I want  you to tell me something first: after you’re dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what’s going to be your best memory of earth?’

’What do you mean? I don’t get it.’

‘What one moment for you defines what it’s like to be alive on this planet. What’s your takeaway?”

−Generation X, Douglas Coupland

“Option paralysis:  The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.” −Generation X, Douglas Coupland

 “Like anybody, I wanted to find out if my life was ever going to make sense, or maybe even feel like a story.” − Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

“When the stores close, I try to find a comedy at the theaters, or I go to a coffee place. The 1990s were great because suddenly lonely people had a place where they could all be lonely together while pretending to be fine on the outside.” − Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

“I’ve always felt sorry for those actors in movies and on TV whom you recognize instantly but whose name you’ll never know. They’re simply familiar, and that is the essence of their employability.” − Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

“Even the smallest of life’s daily details- new toner cartridge for the copier, a faulty traffic light on Marine Drive- seemed charmed and profound.” − Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

“It was inconsequential, yet glorious.” − Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

“It has been said, by someone far wiser than myself, that nobody is boring who is willing to tell the truth about himself. To narrow this down further, someone equally wise said that the things that make us ashamed are also the things that make us interesting.” − Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

“Life is finite…if nothing else, you get used to being alive.” − Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

Charlie: how come you looked so happy?

ald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

Charlie: She thought you were pathetic.

Donald: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. I learned that a long time ago. – Adaptation

“Love is like this, plenty of places to sit but an overall feeling that the room needs a good uptight scrubbing until everything that mentions your mother has been washed away.”

 Adverbs, Daniel Handler

”Is it possible to lose someone who only stepped in front of you once in a towel? Yes yes yes, oh baby yes.” − Adverbs, Daniel Handler

“This is love, saltwater taffy. Pretty much everybody has had some. Somebody offers it on a

day when you have nothing to do, and most likely you’ll take it and put it in your mouth. It unites us, saltwater taffy, but whose favorite is it? Who likes it best? Just about nobody. So why do we eat it? This love story is about this style of love, this sweet thing that exists unasked for, that everybody eats out of the same bag.”

 Adverbs, Daniel Handler

“They say love is in the details, that it’s the little things that make a person special, but then why are the love songs so alike? It’s your smile, it’s your eyes, I love your eyes and your smile.” − Adverbs, Daniel Handler

”…The world is full of people you don’t know and might as well be nice to because they won’t leave.” − Adverbs, Daniel Handler

“In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things where we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too. Sometimes we walk away from the forest and abandon a person there and never see them again. This happens every day. Every day this happens and scarcely anybody cares.”

 Adverbs, Daniel Handler

“It can feel a little bit like love, these conversations where we say things that pop into our heads as if they are things we always feel but never say to anyone, but it’s not love. Love is, I hope, more than two people sitting down for a while and telling secrets before help arrives.” − Adverbs, Daniel Handler

“We were young; obviously we wanted meaning from life.” Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland

“I still lived…with the belief that meaning could pop into my life at any moment. I was getting no younger, yet for some reason not particularly wiser.” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland

“It’s only when things get out of balance that the effect of life is visible.” -Harry Pesin, Why Is A Crooked Letter

“Choice is the mother of neuroticism…My father rushed into things because he did not want to worry himself sick. He would rather make the wrong choice swiftly and regret it long afterward.” -Harry Pesin, Why Is A Crooked Letter

“The duality of my response was so typical. There was always a balance of feelings in me, one diluting the other, and I thirsted for the catharsis of an unblended, drenching emotional response that would overwhelm every reservation I ever felt.” -Harry Pesin, Why Is A Crooked Letter

“Fear is the father of faux pas.” -Harry Pesin, Why Is A Crooked Letter

“We haven’t really come very far in this civilization, have we?” –Life is a Strange Place, Frank Turner Hollon

“It seems more like a miracle when there are no crunchy little details. Details lead to analysis, analysis leads to reason and reason can screw up a miracle like nothing else I know.” –Life is a Strange Place, Frank Turner Hollon

“The strip joint phenomenon should be the subject of psychological books. Men act like animals in the jungle. They come together from all levels and walks of life to wallow in their common denominator of basic lust. The girls work the room and spot the weak members of the herd to coo and kiss and wiggle money from their fat little wallets. Because we are programmed to believed that a woman must like us before we can expect her to remove her clothes, it isn’t hard to begin to believe that the gorgeous young girl dancing in the spotlight above has selected us as the only man in the room she actually likes.” –Life is a Strange Place, Frank Turner Hollon

“Sometimes we get so comfortable with our own craziness we begin to believe we’re normal, we’re the standard of normalcy. We dig our own ruts and then lose perspective.” –Life is a Strange Place, Frank Turner Hollon

“The Fun imperative: the sensation that a Saturday night not devoted to having a good time is a major human failure and possible evidence of a character flaw.” – Susan Orlean, Saturday Night

“In the era of disaster news, people have come to expect to be written about only when something exceptional or shocking takes place in their lives…All I could say was that I was looking for things that were neither exceptional nor shocking, and that would reveal what a typical Saturday night was like for somebody…I like the contrariness of examining leisure in an era that is obsessed with work, and writing about average citizens in an era that celebrates celebrity.”  – Susan Orlean, Saturday Night

“I realized that Saturday night is mostly mythic: larger than life, more meaningful the less closely it is examined, romantic in the purest way, more an idea than an event.” – Susan Orlean, Saturday Night

“Como es possible que el ser entero, sin desperdicio o abandono alguno, se pierda en la carne y la mirada del ser amado y pierda, al mismo tiempo, todo sentido del mundo exterior al amor?” –Carlos Fuentes, En Esto Creo

“The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune.” –Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“And the Air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.” –Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it…is much the harder thing to do.” –Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Anything’s possible in Human Nature…Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy.” –Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“With that cold feeling on a hot afternoon that Life had been Lived.” –Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“It’s a little complex watching someone you desperately love trying to impress someone they desperately love…(what kind of love is it where you’re rooting for your loved one to fail?…)” - Family on Ice, Jane McCafferty

“This life is big.” - Family on Ice, Jane McCafferty

“One life, he wanted to call to her, you got one life and this is one night in that one life, and your nights are numbered. Do you care? Do you not grasp that life could be more like the movies if only you got out of your stupid car and opened your heart, not wide, not with any degree of trust, or, hell, even interest, but rather like you open the front door for the cat, just enough for the animal to slink through into the open air?” -Light of Lucy, Jane McCafferty

“Were someone to approach me someday and demand that i define myself, as best I could, in one sentence or less, I would not need a long sentence, nor any time to drum up a few choice descriptive words such as “demanding,” or tenderhearted,” or “brutally honest,” all of which would be true in some sense, the way that almost anything said about anyone can be true, given the complexities and vagaries of the human character. Instead, I would simply say, “I am a man who loves to drive.” - Stadium Hearts, Jane McCafferty

“I was occupied by a state of mind, as if I were approaching a great occasion of some sort, an occasion that demanded the heart, not the body, be appropriately dressed.” - Stadium Hearts, Jane McCafferty

“I listened to that song forty times. I do this sometimes. It’s like I can’t stand the joy or the pain in a song, I want to play it so it won’t be able to take me with it anymore, I want to play it until I’m deaf to it. Like Billie Holiday’s best songs. Don’t you want to play them until you’re deaf? Am i the only one who ever wanted to have sex with a song?”- Thank You for the Music, Jane McCafferty

“She wasn’t much of a talker when there was nothing to say.” -The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

“You know, I’ve never really known what the fuck it means, to tell you the truth. Bob Dylan said it, not me, and I’d always thought it sounded good. But this was the first situation I’d ever been in where I was able to put the idea to the test, and I could see that it didn’t work.” -A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

“You get used to that, the feeling that you’re suddenly different, when you’re younger. You wake up in the morning and you can’t believe that you had a crush on this person, or used to like that sort of music, even if it was only a few weeks ago.” -A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

“We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can’t have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we’re so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they’re not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. Maybe not out loud, if it’s going to get you into trouble. ‘I wish I’d never married him.’ ‘I wish she was still alive.’ ‘I wish I’d never had kids with her.’ ‘I wish I had a whole shitload of money.’ ‘I wish all the Albanians would go back to fucking Albania.’ Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it’ll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you’re living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies just for one minute.” -A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

“And even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it’s moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there’s music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who’ve read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavours, and. there’s plenty out there.” A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

“The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order…The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.” - 1984, George Orwell

“We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one but this is the one that happened.” - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“It’s not a horrible world…but it’s filled with horrible people.” -Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren’t on our lists, people we’ve never met, but want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe… But I knew that there couldn’t e pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”  -Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“I told her, ‘Iced coffee, please.’ She asked, ‘What size?’ I said, ‘Vente, and could you please use coffee ice cubes so it doesn’t get all watery when the ice cubes melt?’ She told me they didn’t have coffee ice cubes. I said, ‘Exactly.’” -Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future.”  -Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you’d turn red, obviously, and if you flet like shiitake you’d turn brown, and if you were blue you’d turn blue.

Everyone could know what everyone else felt and we could be more careful with each other, because you’d never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you’re angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, ‘Congratulations!’

Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you’re feeling a lot of something, but you don’t know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I’m happy! That whole time

I was actually happy! What a relief!”  -Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pockets of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line of the New York City marathon it would sound like war.” -Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“‘Well, it’s just that wouldn’t it be great if mattresses had spaces for your arm, so that when you rolled onto your side, you could fit just right?’ ‘That would be nice.’ ‘And good for your back, probably, because it would let your spine be straight, which I know is important.’ ‘That is important.’ ‘Also, it would make snuggling easier. You know how that arm constantly gets in the way?’ ‘I do.’ ‘And making snuggling easier is important.’ ‘Very.’” -Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.” –Neil Gaiman

 “And this was when his accounts would hit a raw nerve: I had wanted to travel, to be able to tell such stories, stories that might make other people think my life had been worth living.” -How One Carries Another, People I Wanted To Be, Gina Ochsner

Where do our words go once they’ve been spoken?” – How One Carries Another, People I Wanted To Be, Gina Ochsner

I suddenly wanted to live until I used life up, ran it dry and left it with a shudder or a shout.” - How One Carries Another, People I Wanted To Be, Gina Ochsner

I had learned in school that the laws of the universe are simple, much simpler than we are inclined to believe. I thought of the law of returns and figured that my one good deed, my one little kindness, might one day come back to me. And so when [she] approached me first thing the next morning, I felt giddy. Maybe, finally, the universe was repaying me a cosmic debt.” –From the Fourth Row, People I Wanted to Be, Gina Ochsner

I could wonder how many nights I’ll pass this way, waiting for another day to fold up quietly…I tell myself I’m not defeated, not lonely, not with all this noise and bustling. In the morning I wake with a start, the thought that something unexpected, something magical even, might still happen to a guy like me.” –From the Fourth Row, People I Wanted to Be, Gina Ochsner

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule I know of, babies- God damnit, you’ve got to be kind.” God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut

“There’s nothing better than walking around catching little snippets of the conversations of others. You wouldn’t believe how many different things are being talked about out there, and all at the same time. Hell, I hope someone else heard what I was saying and spreads the word.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“The institution of the university was transformed long ago from a center of learning into a center of earning. The pursuits of wisdom, truth, knowledge, and freedom are as antiquated as the masonry monuments that bear such academic platitudes, having given way, respectively, to the corrosive pursuits of profit, efficiency, technical expertise and employment.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Argue naked. It works very well. It’s hard to be naked and take yourself too seriously. Think about Adam and Eve. As the story goes, they were naked in the Garden of Eden. There was no bickering in paradise.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Mostly they practice good cheer, which, they maintain, is the obvious purpose of existence.” –Just A Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Conversing is best an experience rather than an activity.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“She executed a less-than-perfect pirouette, delightful nonetheless for its honesty of expression, like the raspy, cannabis-strained voice of a blues musician who can’t quite hit all the notes but reaches for them with supreme confidence of spirit anyway.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Don’t think this is some unique circumstance. This same situation plays itself out again and again every time an idealistic youth replaces their hope and their values with practicality, and an obsolete society convinces another generation that everything’s working just fine.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Life is short in the long run, but we humans, for better or for worse, are rather absentminded when it comes to our mortality. Perhaps this is that which afflicts our civilization so horribly. What injustice, avarice, laziness, or bad mood is conceivable if death is kept in mind?” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Hell yes I’m an idealist. Romantics of the world, rejoice! The return of the romantic reaction and triumph is at hand! Anyway, what’s the alternative? Realism? No thanks. I’ll take ideality over reality any time. If I were a realist I’d have to kill myself.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“A hopeless romantic is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. I’m a hopeful romantic.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“That’s the basis of society, imagining¸ not knowing, each other’s perspective. Human consciousness is a big game of make-believe. It’s nothing more than mutually fanciful speculation, and the self, consequently, is nothing more than a ridiculous illusion at best and a destructive delusion at worst. We can’t know each other’s perspective, we only pretend we can. That’s why people walk around so terrified of each other most of the time.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Language is a piss-poor attempt at telepathy is what it is. We try to put our thoughts in each other’s heads through language. But half the intended meaning gets lost in transmission, and the other half is filtered through existing assumptions. Everything is a half truth!” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Whenever you find yourself putting forth great effort without success, you’re trying to force something that will not fit under the circumstances. That’s a destructive waste of time. And if that isn’t enough to keep in mind, your techniques must always be allowed to evolve and change, in relationships, in life, in science, in society. Otherwise you stagnate, and you won’t get anywhere in the long run.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“But I pause to consider: Is this feeling of glorious well-being false, or are we experiencing what is so? That is to say, are we simply blind to contentment and peace when not laughing? Do we fail to notice the cartwheels and jumping jacks in front of our faces? Smile. A stranger, though unrecognized, exists nonetheless, and has only to be introduced properly for us to remember that they are a long-lost friend. We mustn’t be timid apes. Shyness is self-consciousness, remember. Refocus your consciousness toward others and everything will become clear, the jesters will appear and tickle your fear. They’ve been there all the time. You’ll see what I mean.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“What’s left to say? So near and so clear, the everlasting epiphany, my friend, lies in bumping your head, scratching your ear, blowing your nose. Savor every random event in the perpetually poignant present. Pat your head, rub your belly, and beat on your chest and roar! Pitch a fit for love. Toss a tantrum for life. It’s the least you can do… You have life, and you have each other, and it’ll make the crucial difference between life and death, between happiness and sadness… Creation is a beautiful fact, take it or leave it. Take your next breath, and you have accepted it. Creation is, after all, and there’s really nothing more to say…Consciousness before me, we must keep our wits about us, never forgetting that whatever else this and everything may be and become, it still is. The realization of the ultimate equation, merrily indifferent in its glorious simplicity, it is. It just jolly well is.

It’s never been any different. It ends as it begins, with just a couple of days in between.

Welcome home.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Stories are eventful, full of circumstances of importance and intrigue, but this is not at all an accurate reflection of life. Life, like this chapter, can be rather uneventful at times. Oftentimes you find yourself on the toilet, or in a traffic jam, or watching television commercials, or countless other instances that get edited out when someone asks what you did with your day.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Boredom is the coward’s reaction to staring at a wall.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Dogs live life wagging their tails and getting excited about every little thing. The life of a hound is a runner’s high, panting and goofy but rhythmic as a heartbeat. They run high and free, unaware of any race, uncaring of any leash, running for the run, running because it’s fun, our canine counterparts, our kinder better parts, helpers in the hunt, protectors of the plate, living and accomplishing nothing but infinite frolic and limitless levity, no lines on a resume, no citations on a curriculum vitae.”–Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“There are always other options. Tickling, for instance.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Grown-ups are just children, too, remember, though most of us try to convince ourselves otherwise. The major difference between children and adults is that adults have forgotten that they’re just pretending.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Our sociability is not optional, and we only survive at all because of each other. Yet our cooperation, in this era anyway, has been decidedly selfish. This has gotten us into our climactic fix, increasingly threatening our individual and collective survival. None can survive if everyone tries to be the fittest individual, but all can benefit if together we try to build the fittest society. Thus is our evolutionary conflict. Which is ultimately more adaptive to survival: selfishness or sociability?” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“The problem, oh invisible risibility, is that we are not human enough.” –Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito

“Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The Angel

that presided

birth said,

Little creature,

form’d of

Joy & Mirth,

Go love

without the

help of

any Thing

on Earth.”

-God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion love actually is all around. – from Love, Actually

“I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, ‘The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.’ My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It’s like he’s reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I’ve been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I’m spinning through the same sounds I’ve been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I’ll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else?” – Love is a Mix Tape, Rob Sheffield

“I thought, there is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand, but I’d rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I’d rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides right here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl’s hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.” – Love is a Mix Tape, Rob Sheffield

“Unlike me, Renee was not shy; she was a real people-pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people’s secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did. She was finishing her MFA in fiction, and was always working on stories and novels. She had more ideas than she had time to finish. She loved to get up early in the morning. She loved to talk about wild things she wanted to do in the future.” – Love is a Mix Tape, Rob Sheffield

“Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don’t live in a kind and generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us…but we don’t burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don’t know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don’t need it?”- Love is a Mix Tape, Rob Sheffield

“We tell a lot of stories. I may be lying to you now- who’s to say? It’s just part of who we are. Nothing is as big or as loud or as blue or as soft as we say it is- and not because real life is a plain thing but because adding to the common stock of experience through confabulation seems to be a human job, one we’re definitely up to. The truth is like a fish, isn’t it? Nearly impossible to grab hold of. So we don’t put much stead in it and have fun watching the fools who do, splashing away.”- The Watermelon King, Daniel Wallace

“Is there nothing more pleasurable to one human being than the failure of another?” -The Watermelon King, Daniel Wallace

“I didn’t know what else I could say. It was as if the language I brought with me was insufficient. We were not going to understand one another like that, with words. I was just going to have to be there, among them, and see what happened?” - The Watermelon King, Daniel Wallace

“Note author Harlan Ellison recently lamented that the Internet is destroying people’s use of dictionaries, and this in turn decreases our vocabularies, literacy, and our ability to become great authors. Why? Ellison believes that whenever you look up a word in a real, physical dictionary, you pass dozens of other words, some of which will stay in your memory, triggering serendipitous associations, and engendering a sense of wonder. In the old days, when people used more dictionaries, Ellison thought that people became ‘better, more literate, smarter and well-rounded.” – Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves, Clifford A. Pickover

“You can’t change the past, but you sure can ruin the present by worrying over the future. Remember that half the things we worry about never happen, and the other half are going to happen anyway. So, why worry?” – Kemmons Willson

“The profoundest distances are never geographical.”- John Fowles (or Marcel Proust?)

“We yearn for love and then when we do love we invariably pick someone who won’t love us back .I think what we must yearn for then is the depression that precedes love. It’s much more popular. So many more people tell me they’re depressed than tell me they’re in love.” –My Less Than Secret Life, Jonathan Ames

“Well, I don’t want to kill time. I don’t want it dead, I want it alive…”- My Less Than Secret Life, Jonathan Ames

“Takes all kinds of people to make up a world.” –Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“I waited to find my subject. To see a thing- chess, physics, dance, a painting- and recognize it. I was a stranger in the world. I waited to see something and know it, to say, ‘This is me.’ And I would know that it was now, that one day in my life when the fumbling, the false starts, all the little trials and failures, would stop. I pictured the moment, the rush of excitement, the sure-handed swiftness of apprehension, the stunned look on the teacher’s face. There’d be silence, and I’d feel for one second that I was standing at the center of the universe.” - Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“Bad sufferers, wretched souls who have been betrayed in love or excluded from parties, who are pained by a feeling of intellectual inadequacy or a sense of social inferiority, but who learn nothing from such ills, and indeed react to them by engaging a variety of ruinous defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.” –Alain de Boton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“The moral? to recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather.” – Alain de Boton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Friendship is in the end no more than a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone.” – Marcel Proust

“There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: ‘No, this evening I shan’t be free.’”- Marcel Proust

“Man, a creature clearly less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and particularly possess none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and perhaps he thereby achieves a result slightly more satisfying that caressing his beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips, designed to convey to the palate the taste of whatever whets their appetite, must be content, without understanding their mistake or admitting their disappointment, with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier of the impenetrable and irresistible cheek.” – Marcel Proust

“Why do we kiss people? At one level, merely to generate the pleasurable sensation of rubbing an area of nerve endings against a corresponding strip of soft, fleshy, moist skin tissue. However, the hope with which we approach the prospect of an initial kiss typically extends beyond this. We seek to hold and savor not just a mouth but an entire beloved person.” - Alain de Boton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.” –Marcel Proust

“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.”- Marcel Proust

“One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.” –Marcel Proust

“The self-satisfaction felt by busy men-however idiotic their business- at ‘not having time’ to do what you are doing.” –Marcel Proust

“Two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom; painlessly via a teacher or painfully via life.” –Marcel Proust

“Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.”- Marcel Proust

“When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of ‘jazz’ as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tee and onward to infinity.”- Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, David Sedaris

“His mental reenactment of their last kiss told him, yes, she loves me, and he once again saw Lacey as an illuminating white light, forgetting that white is composed of disparate streaks of color, each as powerful as the whole.” – An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin

“…but what I really wanted was for him to simply tell me his writing secret. Unfortunately, I already knew it: brilliance. Perhaps I should work on that.” –An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin

“There was silence on the other end. The static crackle from one hundred kilometers of telephone lines. Crows sitting on them, shivering, while people conversations darted past under their feet.” –Let Me In, John Ajvide Lindqvist

“’This picture shows us what all the myths we studied told us,’ he concluded, ‘Life is messy, violent, confusing and hopeful.’”- The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb

“You couldn’t always get a table directly overlooking the ocean unless you wanted to wait. But you could still see the ocean out there and the moon, and let yourself get romantic. Let yourself enjoy life.” – Post Office, Charles Bukowski

“God or somebody keeps creating women and tossing them out on the streets, and this one’s ass is too big and that one’s tits are too small, and this one is mad and that one is crazy and that one is a religionist and that one reads tea leaves and this one can’t control her farts, and that one has this big nose, and that one has boney legs…But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman just bursting out of her dress…a sex creature, a curse, the end of it all.” –Post Office, Charles Bukowski

“The ocean…look at it out there, battering, crawling up and down. And underneath all that, the fish, the poor fish fighting each other, eating each other. We’re like those fish, only we’re up here. One bad move and you’re finished. It’s nice to be a champion. It’s nice to know your moves.” – Post Office, Charles Bukowski

“Hard to believe anyone is reading King Lear in the Omega galaxy. Hard to believe the words of Shakespeare would survive a supernova.” –The Dreamer Did Not Exist, David Gessner

“Ernest Becker argues that much of our energy, much of our creativity, much of our life, comes from our attempt to deny the essential fact of our existence: that that existence will end. Whether we consider ourselves life-affirmers, who claim the fear of death has no hold on us, or “realists,” who admit to living in death’s shadow, we are all, according to Becker, both terrified and propelled by our not so happy ending. We throw ourselves into frenzied attempts to fill up the nothingness with “something,” hurling our objects of work or art- our creations- into the void…we fight to stand out, to be something trying to build a narcissistic shield around ourselves that keeps death out. “–The Dreamer Did Not Exist, David Gessner

“Even if my work is not remembered, it gives me much. It fills me up while I am here. But it is more than that. In the end, my work is the something I make out of the nothingness, even if the work does not help me escape oblivion. My work is my sacrifice made at an empty altar.” –The Dreamer Did Not Exist, David Gessner

“His supersized fondness for life, humans, activity, accomplishment, makes you aware of your own negative mind. His seemingly boundless energy makes you aware of how prematurely you habitually pronounce yourself tired…His drive, his fame, the public nature of everything he does makes you giddy grateful for the humble scale of your own life.” –Bill Clinton, Public Citizen, George Saunders

“[About the power of forgiveness] Absolutely essential for a healthy life. IT’s nice for the people you forgive, but it’s life’s blood for you.” –Bill Clinton, Public Citizen, George Saunders

“I say a little prayer that all this luck will make me more compassionate instead of more full of shit.” –Bill Clinton, Public Citizen, George Saunders

“What a thing it is to be trapped in a body. The things that can go wrong, and still there you are, inside yourself, forced to experience all the things going wrong, for as long as they persist, for as long as you persist, no limit to your misery, until you die.” –Bill Clinton, Public Citizen, George Saunders

“He didn’t hear the words but he could feel the shape of them.” The Elegant Rube, Malerie Willens

“Fiction is a lie covering up a deep truth:  it is life as it wasn’t, life as the men and women of a certain age wanted to live it and didn’t and thus had to invent it.”- Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa

“The novelist doesn’t choose his themes; he is chosen by them. He writes on certain subjects because certain things have happened to him. In the choice of a theme, the writer’s freedom is relative, perhaps even nonexistent.” - Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa

“That is the trick great novels play: they convince us that the world is the way they describe it, as if fiction were not what it is, the picture of a world dismantled and rebuilt to satisfy the deicidal urge to remake reality, the urge that fuels the novelist’s vocation whether he knows it or not.” -Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa

“This is the great triumph of technical skill in novel writing: the achievement of invisibility, the ability to endow a story with color, drama, subtlety, beauty and suggestive power so effectively that no reader even notices the story exists; under the spell of its craftsmanship, he feels not that he is reading but rather living a fiction that, for a while at least and as far as he is concerned, supplants life.” - Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa

“I’d rather read novels than autopsy them.” - Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa

“That is why no one can teach anyone else to create; at most, we may be taught to read and write. The rest we must teach ourselves, stumbling, falling and picking ourselves up over and over again. My dear friend: what I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you’ve read in my letters about the structure of the novel, and just sit down and write.” - Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa

“The problem was money and the indignities of life without it.” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“But there was still no pussy on earth he’d rather lick, no hair he’d rather gather in his fist like a golden silk bellpull, no gaze with which he’d rather lock his own at climax…” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“To feel nothing, not the feeblest pulse in the dead mouse from which his urine issued, for three weeks, to believe that she would never again need him and that he would never against want her, and then, on a moment’s notice, to become light-headed with lust: this was marriage as he knew it.” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“He thinks our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it’s out of control, it’s not computers that are making everything virtual, it’s mental health. Everyone’s trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to.” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“The hand wasn’t comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn’t want to give up hard-won territory.” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“She’d never seen so objectively what an illness sex was, what a collection of bodily symptoms, because she’d never been remotely as sick as Robin made her.” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“Suddenly—keenly, terribly—[she] missed her crazy yearnings, her excesses and accesses her innocence. A switch was flipped and Denise’s brain became a passive screen on which was projected a highlight reel of all that was excellent in the person she’d driven away.” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.” –The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

“[Prince] was not concerned about being misquoted; he was concerned about being quoted accurately. He wanted to force the reported to reflect only the sense of the conversation, as opposed to the specific phrases he elected to use. Prince believed that he could represent himself better as an abstraction. – Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

“ …the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. As though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being’s natural state—and so, as a corollary, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any and all questions in order to redress this awful imbalance.’” – Chris Heath, as quoted in Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

“Here’s a question I like to ask people when I’m 5/8 drunk: Let’s say you had the ability to make a very brief phone call into your own past. You are (somehow) given the opportunity to phone yourself as a teenager; in short, you will be able to communicate with the fifteen-year-old version of you. However, you will only get to talk to your former self for fifteen seconds. “– Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

“…almost all of the world happens without us.” – Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

“But then, somehow, usually by accident, you experience joy. And the problem with joy is that it binds you to life; it makes you greedy for more happiness. You experience avarice. You hope your life will go on forever.” –The Cousins, Charles Baxter

“She loved this, and not because she ever had much pleasure from it; it was a gift, the men wanted it, and it was their gratitude that made it good; the way that Bern was the white-hot center of another person’s world for those minutes or hours; the way for a moment it made them both forget everything but this other skin, to forget the shattered souls drifting over the world; how it was cracking in half.” – Delicate Edible Birds, Lauren Groff

“And what about human nature makes us all want to be the one liked the most?” PS, Jill McCorkle

“What sort of person ends up with someone like me? What sort of person finds that acceptable, year to year? We went on vacations and fielded each other’s calls and took turns reading Henk to sleep and let slip away that miracle that was there between us when we first came together…We said to each other I think I know when we should have said Lead me farther through your amazing, amazing interior.” – The Netherlands Lives with Water, Jim Shepard

“This business of being happy was something so long forgotten that she’d forgotten she’d forgotten.” – The Cowboy Tango, Maggie Shipstead

“An appreciation of beauty, even if it is sexual beauty, is a great gift.” – Raw Water, Wells Tower

“flux, n. – The natural state. Our moods change. Our lives change. Our feelings for each other change. Our bearings change. The song changes. The temperature of the shower changes. Accept this. We must accept this.” – The Lover’s Dictionary, David Levithan

“There is no word for the recipient of the love. There is only a word for the giver. There is the assumption that lovers come in pairs.” – The Lover’s Dictionary, David Levithan

“only, adj. That’s the dilemma, isn’t it? When you’re single, there’s the sadness and joy of only me. And when you’re paired, there’s the sadness and joy of only you.” – The Lover’s Dictionary, David Levithan

“There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined. I feel this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly, the way pythons eat…” – Paper Towns, John Green

“What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.” – Paper Towns, John Green

“But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use the root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications.” – Paper Towns, John Green

“There is no shame in preferring happiness.” –Albert Camus

“As Harold took a bite of Bavarian sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be ok. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true. And, so it was, a wristwatch saved Harold Crick.”- From Stranger than Fiction

“An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.”- The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup, Susan Orlean

“…and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I’m on my own. This isn’t home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It makes my heart tremble and my head spin.” –The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“I’m not myself today, he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves. None of us are like this.” –The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.” –The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“A poet’s work…[is] to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” –The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.” –The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor…The world is incompatible, just never forget it: gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can’t ask for a wilder place.” –The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“They can’t quantify the will, so they leave it out of their calculations. But it’s will that gets you up Everest, will and anger, and it can bend any law of nature you care to mention, at least in the short term, gravity not excluded. If you don’t push your luck, anyway.” –The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“What manner of people were these, Saladin wondered with distaste, who enjoyed inflicting their intimacies on non-participating others?” –The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can’t make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.” – Up in the Air, Walter Kirn

“The landscape looked whole in a way it never had before; I could see how it fit together. My parents had lied. They’d taught me we lived in the best place in the world, but I could see now that the world was really one place and that comparing its parts did not make sense or gain our town any advantage over others.” – Up in the Air, Walter Kirn

“Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of…” –Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“Instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favorite songs, the ink would turn blue or red or green and the music would run down my legs.” -Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots.” -Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war and kisses with lips. So, in a sense, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.” -Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.” -Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“There are more places you haven’t heard of than you’ve heard of!” - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“Did you know that in the last 3,500 years there have been only 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world?” - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

“I heard a guardedness in her voice that instantly provoked an equal guardedness in me, and our conversation had a weird, stilted feeling that was completely unlike us. It never went away. After that, seeing Ellen was like seeing one of the guys I’d done it with’ she made me self-conscious, aware of the passing moments and the need to fill them with something.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“His shadow self: that caricature that clings to each of us, revealing itself in odd moments when we laugh or fall still, staring brazenly from certain bad photographs.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“She would look out at other cars full of people she’d never seen, any of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her, making its secret plans.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“But what had killed that innocence—my betrayal, or the telling? Which was the poision? Ah, philosophy.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“You could build a city in the forgotten spaces between things.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“People were vines awaiting the chance to cling…” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“I would submit that regardless of how many people one has touched in one’s life, the very first time, whatever the occasion, is invariably interesting—to become creatures, rather than just voices and thoughts.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“I had learned enough about seductions over the years to know this: real desire, the kind that gnaws and lasts, was nearly always mutual.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“He studies the faces mashed by suffering, the skirmishes and tear-gas clouds and people stunned by rubber bullets and wondered, seriously, whether all of them were pretending. How could anything matter so deeply?” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“I had told Irene it would be blighted, bloated, vacant, and now Rockford heaped upon us a quintessentially awful American landscape, the sort of vista that left Europeans ashen-faced: flat, hangar-sized windowless buildings; a swarm of garish plastic signs; miles of parking lot crammed with big American cars throwing jabs of sunlight off their fenders and hubcaps. It was a land without people, save for a few insect-sized humans sprinkled among the parking lots like stand-ins from an architectural scale model, humans diminished to quasi-nonexistence by the gargantuan buildings and giant Midwestern sky, pale blue, dotted with tufts of cloud, vast and domineering as skies in Africa.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“’We were right,’ he said, and mimed a body shrug, a who’s-to-say-what-makes-the-world-go-round gesture that requires either sobriety in the gesturer or drunkenness in the gestureee to work.” –Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

“This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.” –White Teeth, Zadie Smith

“You are never stronger, thought Samad as he approached the doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.” –White Teeth, Zadie Smith

“What a waste, that something of such beauty should be at the disposal of those too young to know what to do with it.” –White Teeth, Zadie Smith

“His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out.” –White Teeth, Zadie Smith

“More than kisses, letters mingle souls.”- John Donne

“You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, ‘Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn’t love me. He just couldn’t deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.’ Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently loveable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way?” –White Teeth, Zadie Smith

“Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.” –White Teeth, Zadie Smith

“Somehow, Helen had picked up the idea that there was such a thing as love, and she had invested fully in it. She had summoned everything she was, every little tiny scrap of herself, and she’d handed it over to Cal and said: this is yours.” –February, Lisa Moore

“Is this what a life is? Someone, in the middle of cleaning the bathroom, remembers you tasting the ocean on your fingers long after you’re gone.” –February, Lisa Moore

“It seemed important to know what was true about herself. How to put into words the tumult of pleasure her life had been; how to say she had lost something big and was left with hole in the middle of her chest and wind whistling through.” –February, Lisa Moore

“He has given a lot of thought to the nature of time and how a life can be over much too quickly, if you’re not careful. The present is always dissolving into the past, he realized long ago. The present dissolves. It gets used up. The past is virulent and ravenous and everything can be devoured in a matter of seconds.

                That’s the enigma of the present. The past has already infiltrated it…”–February, Lisa Moore

“The whole week had happened in the present tense. Maybe that is love.” –February, Lisa Moore

 

“It’s huge to finally embrace the life you never planned on.”- from Greenberg

 

“I, too, had set out to be remembered. I had wanted to create something permanent in my life- some proof that everything in its way mattered, that working hard mattered, that feeling things mattered, that even sadness and loss mattered, because it was all part of something that would live on. But I had also come to recognize that not everything needs to be durable. the lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or future is not limiting but liberating. Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy; for him, it was always enough to have that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the beloved rubber doll was squeaked. Such a moment was complete in itself, pure and sufficient.”- Rin Tin Tin, The Life and The Legend, Susan Orlean

“He’s rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he’ll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums- hers alone- is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage…” – A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

“I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.” – A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

“One key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by the same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and always, imagining the splendors within.” – A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

“He has an optimist’s attraction to everything new— a faith that it will enrich him, not hurt him.” – A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

“Pretty soon it’ll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.” – A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

“Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she hit him twice across the face; she run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept in a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunninness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy—had never not been happy—and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.” – A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

“She uses ‘found objects.’ They come from our house and our lives. She glues them onto board and shellacs them. She says they’re precious because they’re casual and meaningless. ‘But they tell the whole story if you really look.’” – A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

“Could it be that we fill out our lives, experience all that we experience, and then simply leave this world and are forgotten? I can’t bear thinking that our existence is so insubstantial, a stone thrown in a pond that leaves no ripple. Maybe all that we do in life is just a race against the idea of disappearing. Having children, making money, doing good, being in love, building something, discovering something, inventing something, learning something, collecting something, knowing something: these are the pursuits that make us feel like our lives aren’t flimsy, that they build up bit by bit into stories that are about something achieved, grown , found, build, love, or even lost.” —Rin Tin Tin, The Life and The Legend, Susan Orlean

 

“She talks about it with a quiet weariness, an emotion rubbed smooth, the sort of feeling that comes from having worked very hard to forget that something once hurt very much.” —Rin Tin Tin, The Life and The Legend, Susan Orlean

 

“I had never realized how crackling and alive someone’s papers could be. I always assumed that archives would be as dull as an accountant’s ledger.  But instead, they made me feel as though I had drilled my way inside a still-humming life. It was all there—the details and the ordinariness, the asides and incidentals, and even the misfires and failures that might otherwise have gone unmentioned. These are the things that make up an actual existence, the things a person wouldn’t think to share because they seemed inconsequential, or wouldn’t be willing to share because they seemed too intimate, but they are at the heart of who we are. “—Rin Tin Tin, The Life and The Legend, Susan Orlean

 

“It finally summed up a certain open equation in my life, but it also reduced a persistent memory, and even a persistent melancholy, into an eight-inch plastic figurine. I was happy to have it, but I sometimes missed the bittersweet weight of my memory, of recalling those days at my grandfather’s desk, of feeling so sharply the aches and joys of childhood and the mystery of my family, of realizing that my hunger for that toy had led me to spend these years of my life learning the story of Rin Tin Tin.” —Rin Tin Tin, The Life and The Legend, Susan Orlean

“…the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots and what we call our lives are the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves…We can never predict when those few special moments will occur…There are certain people, not that many, who enter one’s life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means, the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.” – The Paper Lantern, Stuart Dybek

“Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.” –Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger

“The religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.” –Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger

“And in that instant, as she recognized the insurrection inside her, Desdemona became what she’d remain for the rest of her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body.” –Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

“My personal belief that real life doesn’t live up to writing about it.” –Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in ‘sadness,’ or ‘joy,’ or ‘regret.’ Maybe the best proof that  language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, ‘the happiness that attends disaster.’ Or: ‘the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.’” –Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

“I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.” –Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

“I’m not sure any of us knows just how far we have removed ourselves not only from nature but from the natural conditions of life that have prevailed for centuries and have forced men to the extreme limits of their physical capacity in order to simply feed, clothe and otherwise provide for their families, sending them every night to a sweet, exhausted, restorative, unstirred, deserved sleep such as we will never know again.” –Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

“I’m only trying to suggest that as we find ourselves in this particularly unfortunate, misconstrued, ungodly juncture of civilization, let’s not lose sight of the nobler manifestations of man and of the greater half of his character, which consists not of taglines and bottom lines but of love, heroism, reciprocity, ecstasy, kindness and truth.” –Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

“Why had we never, not one of us, stopped, turned around , and said, Knock knock. Sorry to interrupt you…why had we not gone in, sat down?…What fucked you up as a kid and what woman changed your life and what is the thing you will never forgive yourself for?” –Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

“Imagine if one night in a lifetime were looked upon as a scientist might look upon it, or some other life form studying our species, and from that one night, the worth of the entire life were derived. Well, she’d rather hers not be evaluated by the TV she’s watched or the closet she hasn’t cleaned.” –Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

“Intelligent people are not always guided by their intelligence.” –Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

“The human being is a storytelling animal, or, actually, the storytelling animal, the only creature on Earth that tells itself stories in order to understand what sort of creature it is…..lingually liberated imagination.” – Salman Rushdie

“I wondered if this was love, this constant reclamation, this rush to reassure.” –Galatea, Karen Brown

“Aaron decided to pay more attention to the next piece, to follow the music itself rather than what it made him think of. This might be impossible, he knew, to hear only the notes and not daydream or feel thirsty.” –The Worst You Ever Feel, Rebecca Makkai

“And not particularly unnatural since in all things, except for sexual intimacy, variety was a virtue in human enterprise—experience, the sampling of the unknown, was a state of grace and laudable industry.” –Quality of Life, Christine Sneed

“That’s the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything’s dark and you can’t see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.” –Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

“She is tired of soon. Soon is round and smooth, without never’s honest jagged edges. Soon is like the End of the World, always approaching but never arriving. Soon is the excuse people use when nothing ever happens on time.” –Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe, Jenny Hollowell

“All this once seemed to her so comforting. And probably still would, if she had time to look at it from outside. She would probably envy herself, from outside. People may envy her, or at least admire her—thinking she matched him so well, with all her friends and duties and activities and of course her own career as well.” –Fiction, Alice Munro

“But she was proud of that as well; she considered  the shape of her life not peculiar, but original; she lived as she liked; real courage, she believed, was doing what you believed in, however it appeared.” –Eleanor’s Music, Mary Gordon

“The whole wide world was just a big pile of strangers, thinking all the time about everything they were missing.”-Allegiance, Aryn Kyle

“I wrote to myself in my notebooks that I felt my bleak present within me, and ached to my bones with wondering if loneliness would always be the measure of my days.” –Sans Farine, Jim Shepard

“They both had reached a place in their lives when anything rather that rigorous honesty seemed pointless, and because of this they were able throw away a lot of the “getting to know you” rubbish required of strangers who find each other attractive. They were both acutely aware of the value of time, and they were both determined not to waste any that they might have. A real gift.” –Between the Bridge and the River, Craig Ferguson

“Love at first sight is not rare, in fact it is extremely common, it happens to some people a few times a year. The feeling of “what if” when meeting the eyes of a stranger can be love unrecognized.” –Between the Bridge and the River, Craig Ferguson

“The sudden spasm of the major muscles as a person is falling asleep produces a little shock that wakes them up again; it is called a myoclonic jerk.

                It is one of the thousands of little adventures  that occur in the human body that are unsatisfactorily explained by contemporary medicine. Just about everyone experiences these tiny seizures at some point in their life and so they are considered normal, which of course doesn’t tell you much.” –Between the Bridge and the River, Craig Ferguson

“How far is a person the same as their sex life?… Like many people who have caused their own distress, he wanted to believe that events were not a sure guide to character.” – Nigora, Adam Thirlwell, The Book of Other People

“I do not care much about the mysteries of the universe, unless they come to me in words, or in music maybe, or in a set of colours, and then I entertain them merely for their beauty and only briefly.” – Donal Webster, Colm Toibin, The Book of Other People

“…aquellos que de su cuerpo solo saben cuando les duele.” –Ensayo Sobre La Ceguera, Jose Saramago

“…la alegria y la tristeza pueden andar unidas, no son como el agua y el aceite.” –Ensayo Sobre La Ceguera, Jose Saramago

“Si antes de cada accion pudiesemos prever todas sus consecuencias, nos pusiemos a pensar en ellas seriamente, primero en las consecuencias inmediates, despues las probables, mas tarde las possible, luego las imaginables, no llegariamos siquiera a movernos de donde el primer pensamiento nos hubiera hecho detenernos.” –Ensayo Sobre La Ceguera, Jose Saramago

“Son rarisimas las educaciones perfectas y que con incluso los recatos mas discretos tienen sus puntos debiles.” –Ensayo Sobre La Ceguera, Jose Saramago

“La parecio al medico que oia llorar, un sonido casi inaudible, como solo puede ser el de unas lagrimas que se van deslizando lentamente hast alas comisuras de la boca y ahi desaparecen para reanaudar el ciclo eterno de los inexplicables Dolores y alegrias humanas.” –Ensayo Sobre La Ceguera, Jose Saramago

“Un escritor es como otra persona cualquiera, no puede saberlo todo, ni puede vivirlo todo, tiene que preguntar e imaginar.” –Ensayo Sobre La Ceguera, Jose Saramago

“I think people my age are embarrassed by too much enthusiasm and believe that too much passion about anything is naïve. I suppose I do have one unembarrassing passion—I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately…life seemed to be filled with things that were just like the ghost orchid—wonderful to imagine and easy to fall in love with but a little fantastic and fleeting and out of reach.” –The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean

“The sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn’t have seen this space as sad-making and vacant—I think I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found.” –The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean

“Then like all sorriness it hardened into something less stifling.” –The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean

“We forget that there is no hope of joy except in human relations.” –Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Expury

“In a world in which life so perfectly responds to life, where flowers mingle with flowers in the wind’s eye, where the swan is the familiar of all swans, man alone builds his isolation. What a space between men their spiritual natures create! A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter into it? What can one know of a girl who passes, walking with slow steps homeward, eyes lowered, smiling to herself, filled with adorable inventions and with fables? Out of the thoughts, the voice, the silences of al over, she can form an empire, and thereafter she sees in all the world but him a people of barbarians. More surely than if she were on another planet, I feel her to be locked up in her language, in her secret, in her habits, in the singing echoes of her memory.” –Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Expury

“I thought of the white sanatorium where the light of a man’s life goes quietly out in the presence of those who love him and who garner as if it were an inestimable treasure his last words, his ultimate smile. How right they are! Seeing that this same whole is never again to take shape in the world. Never again will be heard exactly that note of laughter, that intonation of voice, that quality of repartee. Each individual is a miracle. No wonder we go on speaking of the dead for twenty years.” –Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Expury

“’Everyone takes everyone for granted,’ she said. ‘It’s a clause in the contract.’” –The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris

“To approach the world with evasion and thanklessness—that was no way to live.” –The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris

“He lacked the courage and the will—although perhaps he had astonishing amounts of both and was simply defeated again, if barely, on a playing field most people never realize exists until the final days and moments of their lives.” –The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris

“…a wave of death washed over him. Not biological death, which brought relief, but the death that harrows the living by giving them a glimpse of the life they’ve been denied. Its sorrow was a thousandfold any typical dying.” –The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris

“A sudden unshakable belief that life was poetic.” –Edible Stories, Mark Kurlansky

“Not eating is the usual way to remember Jewish suffering because normally Jews can imagine no greater suffering.” –Edible Stories, Mark Kurlansky

“She tried to conceal her disappointment. Why are men always leering too much or not enough?” –Edible Stories, Mark Kurlansky