Had Quotes (page 329)
Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn. In Hepburn's eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman.
Jonathan Franzen
By stablishing an acquaintance with Lucie, I too had set my destiny in motion; but I did not lose sight of it. Though we didn't meet very often, at least our mettings were fairly regular, and I knew she was capable of waiting several weeks and then greeting me as if we'd seen each other the day before
Milan Kundera
Just another day in my life. This was one of those days when I thought that maybe a new life, a different life, wouldn't be so bad. But where the hell had I put the receipt, and could you return something that was over twenty years old? Where do you go to get a new life when your old one has you so puzzled you don't know how to fix it? Wish I knew.
Laurell K. Hamilton
As in many other cities, money no longer had any value in Istanbul. At the time I returned from the East, bakeries that once sold large one-hundred drachma loaves of bread for one silver coin now baked loaves half the size for the same price, and they no longer tasted the way they did during my childhood.
Orhan Pamuk
We take our bearings from the wrong landmark, wish that when young we had studied the stars - name the flowers for ourselves and the deserts after others. When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. One can only say, it will be a whole - a region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colours. Not to direct, but to solace us; not to fix our positions, but to show us how...
Shirley Hazzard
I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people had children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.
Jodi Picoult
He tried to think of something to say but could not. He's had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things toe eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down...
Cormac McCarthy

She stretched out her hand, saying, “Vernon! My dear, what a delightful surprise!”
“What’s surprising about it?” he enquired, lifting his black brows. “Didn’t you ask me to come?”
The smile remained pinned to Lady Buxted’s lips, but she replied with more than a touch of acidity: “To be sure I did, but so many days ago that I supposed you had gone out of town!”
“Oh, no!” he said, returning her smile with one of great sweetness.
Georgette Heyer
I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there. I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy-tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity. Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in...
Richard Brautigan