“I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass”
—C.S. Lewis
January 2012
“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me.”
—Jane Austen
“Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.”
—Bret Easton Ellis - Lunar Park
“‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.’”
—Lewis Carroll
“To me, art itself is a religion.”
—Jonathan Franzen
“No, darling. I won’t ever leave you for some one else. I suppose all sorts of dreadful things will happen to us. But you don’t have to worry about that.”
—A Farewell to Arms
“Why are you sad?”
“Because you speak to me in words, and I look at you with feelings.” — Anna Karina, Pierrot Le Fou
“Because you speak to me in words, and I look at you with feelings.” — Anna Karina, Pierrot Le Fou
“But they would sometimes stop before the complete disclosure of a thought and would then try to imagine a phrase that could express it anyway. She did not confess her passion for another man; he did not say that he had forgotten her.”
—Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
Killing Charlemagne: excerpt from Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut →
killingcharlemagne.tumblr.com
In the beginning, God created earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned…
“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.”
—Douglas Coupland, Generation X
I know it's so fucking stupid
But I really just want to be in a good relationship with someone. I’m tired of waiting. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be the person I’m going to marry. I just want someone who I can have a lot of fun with and cuddle and watch tv.
Maybe I’m just being stupid, but I’m tired of feeling so alone.
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
—Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)
“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”
—Oscar Wilde
“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”
—John Steinbeck, The Winter of our Discontent
“I am but a withered rose whose thorns have been sheared off by a reckless gardener.”
—Nichole Camille Corbett
