"And that's the thing, she concludes. Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower."

"In a way, John Voss is like Jesus - blameless, perhaps, but nevertheless the center of all the trouble... Dead? Is that what she means? She hopes not. No one could want this boy, this child who had dangled from a laundry bag inside a dark closet, not to exist. Merely for him not to exist here, because here has proven to be the wrong place. She feels like Jesus' disciples must've felt. They never wanted him crucified, of course, but what a relief it must have been when the stone was rolled across the entrance to the tomb, sealing everything shut so they could go back to being fishermen, which they knew how to do, rather than fishers of men, which they didn't. No wonder they didn't recognize him later on the road to Emmaus. They didn't want to, any more than Tick wants to welcome this poor boy back into their midst."

-Empire Falls - Richard Russo

 

"Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, "is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses."
"Yeah?" said Shadow.
"Quoting," said Wednesday. "Quoting someone French. That's who they have a statue to, in their New York harbor: a bitch who liked to be fucked on the refuse from the tumbril. Hold your torch as high as you want to, m'dear, there's still rats in your dress and cold jism dripping down your leg."

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"

"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead."

"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

Jack of all trades, master of none though oft times better than the master of one.

  I asked her, “Could we kiss for a little bit?”

“Excuse me,” she said, although, on the other hand, she didn’t pull her head back.

I told her, “Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.”

“And the more you wage war?”

- JS Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

"Seymour once said to me--in a crosstown bus, of all places--that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, day and night, heat and cold." - Buddy Glass

"I've studied and maybe learned how things are, but I'm not even close to why they are. And you must not expect to find that people understand what they do."

`





♠

“And it’s fine because it’s been this way with girls a while now, these random things, because I know I’m too much for anyone, that if I let myself I’d love them all, I’d think they could fix me. But I know they can’t, and it’s enough, because every so often when a girl kisses me, touches my hand, my face, I remember that the world has light.”

- Brad Land, Goat





Ω

I can remember the title, author, and location of every book in this library, Matthew. Every book that's ever been dreamed. Every book that's ever been imagined. Every book that's ever been lost. Millions upon millions of them. That's what I remember. It's my job. Other things … I forget sometimes.

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quiet continuously a sense of their existence and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."