Differ Quotes (page 90)
For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her galoshes on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their galoshes, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no...
J. D. Salinger
Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop — everywhere and much more subtly the...
Virginia Woolf
Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.
Jorge Luis Borges
I have studied many religions, many different persuasions of thought in Christian belief, and I have come, in this experience to this: the most important question in anyone's life is the question asked by poor Pilate in Matthew 27:22: 'What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?' No Other question in the whole sweep of human experience is as important as this. It is the choice between life and death, between meaningless existence and life abundant. What will you do with Christ?...
Dale Evans
Espinoza experienced something similar, though slightly different in two respects. First, the need to be near Liz Norton struck some time before he got back to his apartment in Madrid. By the time he was on the plane he’d realized that she was the perfect woman, the one he’d always hoped to find, and he began to suffer. Second, among the ideal images of Norton that passed at supersonic speed through his head as the plane flew toward Spain at four hundred miles an hour, there were more sex...
Roberto Bolano
I wish that my childhood would have been different. I do not, however, regret what happened. This does not mean tht I would gladly go through it again. But mythologies of all times and all places tell us that those who enter the abyss and survive can bring back important lessons. I have no need to merely imagine the unimaginable. And I will no longer forget. I have learned that whether I choose to feel or not, pain exists, and whether we choose to acknowledge them or not, atrocities continue....
Derrick Jensen
I’m an egotist, but I’m not selfish. There’s a difference. I’m a neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself. It isn’t that I think myself so important... I simply can’t think about anything else, that’s all. If I could fall in love with a woman that might help some. But I can’t find a woman who interests me.
Henry Miller