quotes
this page will be periodically updated with quotes from novels/poems/poetry collections/non-fiction that i read. (i won't bombard your friend's page with all of it each time i update it. instead, the link to this entry will always be on the left.) i am a collector of quotes and i all-too-often misplace them or forget where i've written them down. hopefully this collection will eliminate that problem.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
...metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
...the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come crashing down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. (more p. 209)
100 Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
...the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.
[She] wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity.
It's not the first time that a woman has gone crazy over a man.
...he was lifting up the tiles to get to the bathroom where [she] was waiting for him, naked and trembling with love among the scorpions and the butterflies...
...the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
...for me change, passing from one thing to another, is a partial death. A part of us dies, and our sadness about its dying or passing away cannot but touch our hearts.
...even though I do not want them, I have in me the very philosophies that I criticize, as if they were souls. ... I can not reject them because they are who I am.
There are metaphors that are more real than the people walking down the street. There are images in the street corners of books that live more clearly than men and women. There are literary phrases that possess an absolutely human individuality.
The most vulgar aspect of dreams is that everyone has them.
...the rain fell like a nightmare.
A person asleep becomes a child again. Perhaps it's because while we're asleep we can't do bad things, and so long as he does not realize he is alive, so long as he sleeps, the greatest criminal, the most ironbound egoist, is sacred, because of a natural magic. Between killing someone asleep and killing a child, I cannot detect the slightest difference.
...they are expressions for which I lack a dictionary but for which I do not entirely lack understanding. ... I understand without knowing, like a blind man being talked to about colors.
Enormous sea, my noisy childhood friend, who rests and lulls me, because your voice is not human and cannot someday recite in a low voice my weaknesses and imperfections into human ears.
To speak is to have too much consideration for others. Both fish and Oscar Wilde die because they can't keep their mouths shut.
The principal error of the literary imagination is to suppose that other people are like us and that they should feel as we do. But happily for humanity, every person is only who he is. To genius alone has been given the ability to be others.
He who makes his existence monotonous is wise because then every small incident has the privelege of being a marvel.
There is nothing that reveals poverty of mind more quickly than not knowing how to be witty except at the expense of others.
Surfacing
Margaret Atwood
...fear has a smell as love does.
He said he loved me, the magic word, it was supposed to make everything light up, I'll never trust that word again.
A divorce is like an amputation, you survive, but there's less of you.
Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies, love conquers all, conquerors love all...
The City in Which I Loved You
Li Young Lee
Everything is punished by your absence.
The Thing Is
Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
[note: i realize that this is more than a quote, but each line is necessary.]
Snow Falling on Cedars
David Guterson
He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it... their love was entirely unavoidable.
He wanted to put his mouth against hers and leave it there forever. He knew now that he might do so without regretting it.
He told himself that he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never happen again in just this way no matter how long he lived.
[She] insisted that duty was less important than love. [He insisted that] love went deep and meant life itself, but honor could not be turned from.
Still, you should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart–or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this–silence is better.
Shikata ga nai. [Japanese] It cannot be helped, it has to be.
...a life in defeat was not for a moment worth living.
Grief [can] attach itself with permanence... It attaches itself and then it burrows inside and makes a nest and stays. It eats whatever is warm nearby, and then the coldness settles in permanently. You learn to live with it.
Giving herself over to his wounds was both disturbing and rewarding...she took when she could a piece of his sorrow and stored it for him in her own heart.
It was something he remembered too often. He felt inside not only an aversion to it but an attraction to it as well. He did not want to remember and he wanted to remember. It was not something he could explain.
Accident rules every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.
Poppies
Mary oliver
There isn't a place in this world that doesn't sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness.
...of course loss is the great lesson.
Anne Sexton, a Self-Portrait in Letters
Anne Sexton
I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.
The sanest thing in this world is love.
Whatever I am I am because I wrote it.
Poetry to me is prayer - the rest of it is leftovers.
I do what I do because I don't know how to be someone else.
Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
the strong young pump of her heart
death beds make people tired indeed
he had the power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love
it was like continually shaking hands with a glove from which the hand had been withdrawn
He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized
like most women she liked to be told how she should feel
Don't you know you can't do anything about people?
He saw a flash of unhappiness on her mouth, so brief that only he would have noticed.
he thought how differently women use their bodies from men
It was a tradition between them that they should never be too tired for anything
Stepping with the confidence of women lovely to men
Rosemary made an exit that she had learned young, and which no director had ever tried to improve
but i love the most, and i can tell when you're away from me, even a little
a featureless sky
Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as 'cruelty'
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.
She was [him] too, the drought in the marrow of his bones.
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemmingway
He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his sharp tale which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy's aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.
That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought.
Letters Home
Sylvia Plath
I want you to grow to a certainty of your identity...which will never ask for another court of appeal but your own conscience. That often means sacrificing the tempting urge to spill over All (blues, defeats, insecurities) to another person, hoping for advice, sympathy or sometimes even scolding as punishment. It means knowing when to go off for a Socratic talk to yourself.
(in a letter to her brother after he went through a difficult breakup)
The History of Love
Nicole Krauss
To everything a season, to every time I've woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me...
I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust. I used to let the door slam in people's faces. I farted where I wanted to fart. I accused cashiers of cheating me out of a penny, while holding the penny in my hand. And then one day I realized I was on my way to becoming the sort of schmuck who poisons pigeons. People crossed the street to avoid me. I want human cancer. And to be honest: I wasn't really angry. Not anymore. I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park bench and walked away. And yet. It had been so long, I didn't know any other way of being. One day I woke up and said to myself: It's not too late. The first days were strange. I had to practice smiling in front of the mirror. But it came back to me. It was as if a weight had been lifted. I let go, and something let go of me. A couple of months later, I found [him].
I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.
...the albatrosses of Antarctica: they can go years without touching the ground, sleep aloft in the sky, drink sea water, cry out the salt, and return year after year to raise babies with the same mate.
ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.
"If you remember the first time you saw [her], you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window. Come back! you shouted. Come back! Come back!
But she didn't.
And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that had grown around a fence.
For a long time it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without [her]. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it."
She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that had grown around a fence.
...like so much we no longer need but can't give up...
Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
It wasn't until two months later, [she] writes, during the first moments of sadness that seemed to slip in through the open window without our noticing, disturbing the rarefied atmosphere that comes with the beginning of love...
Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again.
...right now, in this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life.
1: You got a little happier and a little sadder.
2: Meaning they cancel each other out, leaving me exactly the same.
1: Not at all. The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also got a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life.
One day my father laughed and corrected me. Everything snapped into focus. It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
You asked if I was married. I was once, but that was a long time ago, and we were clever or stupid enough not to have a child. We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.
New kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: The eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.
...there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.
...he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face.
And then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father—to teach your child to live without you.
I was as close as I'd ever been to him. As far away.
At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.
Why do people always get named after dead people? If they have to be named after anything at all, why can't it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky, or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?
...the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she built a world out of them she knew how to survive in, even if no one else could.
The longing that exists between species
An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him.
If a horse knew how small a man is compared to it, it would trample him.
Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the thing that struck me the most about life is the capacity for change... At first it's hard to bear, but after awhile you learn not to look at it as a loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.
I like to imagine the first time she leaned in to kiss that stranger, how she must have felt herself falling for him, or perhaps simply away from her loneliness, and it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is part of the history of love.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
...metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
...the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come crashing down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. (more p. 209)
100 Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
...the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.
[She] wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity.
It's not the first time that a woman has gone crazy over a man.
...he was lifting up the tiles to get to the bathroom where [she] was waiting for him, naked and trembling with love among the scorpions and the butterflies...
...the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
...for me change, passing from one thing to another, is a partial death. A part of us dies, and our sadness about its dying or passing away cannot but touch our hearts.
...even though I do not want them, I have in me the very philosophies that I criticize, as if they were souls. ... I can not reject them because they are who I am.
There are metaphors that are more real than the people walking down the street. There are images in the street corners of books that live more clearly than men and women. There are literary phrases that possess an absolutely human individuality.
The most vulgar aspect of dreams is that everyone has them.
...the rain fell like a nightmare.
A person asleep becomes a child again. Perhaps it's because while we're asleep we can't do bad things, and so long as he does not realize he is alive, so long as he sleeps, the greatest criminal, the most ironbound egoist, is sacred, because of a natural magic. Between killing someone asleep and killing a child, I cannot detect the slightest difference.
...they are expressions for which I lack a dictionary but for which I do not entirely lack understanding. ... I understand without knowing, like a blind man being talked to about colors.
Enormous sea, my noisy childhood friend, who rests and lulls me, because your voice is not human and cannot someday recite in a low voice my weaknesses and imperfections into human ears.
To speak is to have too much consideration for others. Both fish and Oscar Wilde die because they can't keep their mouths shut.
The principal error of the literary imagination is to suppose that other people are like us and that they should feel as we do. But happily for humanity, every person is only who he is. To genius alone has been given the ability to be others.
He who makes his existence monotonous is wise because then every small incident has the privelege of being a marvel.
There is nothing that reveals poverty of mind more quickly than not knowing how to be witty except at the expense of others.
Surfacing
Margaret Atwood
...fear has a smell as love does.
He said he loved me, the magic word, it was supposed to make everything light up, I'll never trust that word again.
A divorce is like an amputation, you survive, but there's less of you.
Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies, love conquers all, conquerors love all...
The City in Which I Loved You
Li Young Lee
Everything is punished by your absence.
The Thing Is
Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
[note: i realize that this is more than a quote, but each line is necessary.]
Snow Falling on Cedars
David Guterson
He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it... their love was entirely unavoidable.
He wanted to put his mouth against hers and leave it there forever. He knew now that he might do so without regretting it.
He told himself that he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never happen again in just this way no matter how long he lived.
[She] insisted that duty was less important than love. [He insisted that] love went deep and meant life itself, but honor could not be turned from.
Still, you should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart–or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this–silence is better.
Shikata ga nai. [Japanese] It cannot be helped, it has to be.
...a life in defeat was not for a moment worth living.
Grief [can] attach itself with permanence... It attaches itself and then it burrows inside and makes a nest and stays. It eats whatever is warm nearby, and then the coldness settles in permanently. You learn to live with it.
Giving herself over to his wounds was both disturbing and rewarding...she took when she could a piece of his sorrow and stored it for him in her own heart.
It was something he remembered too often. He felt inside not only an aversion to it but an attraction to it as well. He did not want to remember and he wanted to remember. It was not something he could explain.
Accident rules every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.
Poppies
Mary oliver
There isn't a place in this world that doesn't sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness.
...of course loss is the great lesson.
Anne Sexton, a Self-Portrait in Letters
Anne Sexton
I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.
The sanest thing in this world is love.
Whatever I am I am because I wrote it.
Poetry to me is prayer - the rest of it is leftovers.
I do what I do because I don't know how to be someone else.
Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
the strong young pump of her heart
death beds make people tired indeed
he had the power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love
it was like continually shaking hands with a glove from which the hand had been withdrawn
He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized
like most women she liked to be told how she should feel
Don't you know you can't do anything about people?
He saw a flash of unhappiness on her mouth, so brief that only he would have noticed.
he thought how differently women use their bodies from men
It was a tradition between them that they should never be too tired for anything
Stepping with the confidence of women lovely to men
Rosemary made an exit that she had learned young, and which no director had ever tried to improve
but i love the most, and i can tell when you're away from me, even a little
a featureless sky
Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as 'cruelty'
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.
She was [him] too, the drought in the marrow of his bones.
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemmingway
He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his sharp tale which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy's aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.
That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought.
Letters Home
Sylvia Plath
I want you to grow to a certainty of your identity...which will never ask for another court of appeal but your own conscience. That often means sacrificing the tempting urge to spill over All (blues, defeats, insecurities) to another person, hoping for advice, sympathy or sometimes even scolding as punishment. It means knowing when to go off for a Socratic talk to yourself.
(in a letter to her brother after he went through a difficult breakup)
The History of Love
Nicole Krauss
To everything a season, to every time I've woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me...
I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust. I used to let the door slam in people's faces. I farted where I wanted to fart. I accused cashiers of cheating me out of a penny, while holding the penny in my hand. And then one day I realized I was on my way to becoming the sort of schmuck who poisons pigeons. People crossed the street to avoid me. I want human cancer. And to be honest: I wasn't really angry. Not anymore. I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park bench and walked away. And yet. It had been so long, I didn't know any other way of being. One day I woke up and said to myself: It's not too late. The first days were strange. I had to practice smiling in front of the mirror. But it came back to me. It was as if a weight had been lifted. I let go, and something let go of me. A couple of months later, I found [him].
I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.
...the albatrosses of Antarctica: they can go years without touching the ground, sleep aloft in the sky, drink sea water, cry out the salt, and return year after year to raise babies with the same mate.
ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.
"If you remember the first time you saw [her], you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window. Come back! you shouted. Come back! Come back!
But she didn't.
And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that had grown around a fence.
For a long time it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without [her]. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it."
She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that had grown around a fence.
...like so much we no longer need but can't give up...
Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
It wasn't until two months later, [she] writes, during the first moments of sadness that seemed to slip in through the open window without our noticing, disturbing the rarefied atmosphere that comes with the beginning of love...
Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again.
...right now, in this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life.
1: You got a little happier and a little sadder.
2: Meaning they cancel each other out, leaving me exactly the same.
1: Not at all. The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also got a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life.
One day my father laughed and corrected me. Everything snapped into focus. It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
You asked if I was married. I was once, but that was a long time ago, and we were clever or stupid enough not to have a child. We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.
New kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: The eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.
...there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.
...he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face.
And then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father—to teach your child to live without you.
I was as close as I'd ever been to him. As far away.
At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.
Why do people always get named after dead people? If they have to be named after anything at all, why can't it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky, or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?
...the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she built a world out of them she knew how to survive in, even if no one else could.
The longing that exists between species
An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him.
If a horse knew how small a man is compared to it, it would trample him.
Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the thing that struck me the most about life is the capacity for change... At first it's hard to bear, but after awhile you learn not to look at it as a loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.
I like to imagine the first time she leaned in to kiss that stranger, how she must have felt herself falling for him, or perhaps simply away from her loneliness, and it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is part of the history of love.