He Quotes (page 275)
I remembered lying there in my wet panties, going, “What do I do now?” Jason was asleep, but even if he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have told him what had happened. I was convinced I’d never have heard the end of it. “Wet the bed like a baby!” he’d cry. Well, knowing Jason, he probably wouldn’t have said any such thing. But in my feverish four-year-old brain, I was convinced he wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore if he knew I was a bed wetter. Also, of course, it would come up every time I beat...
Meg Cabot
While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.
Virginia Woolf
If he thinks he would harm Mirabelle, he would back away. But he does not yet understand when and how people are hurt. He doesn't understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
Steve Martin
The first time I hung out with [David Blaine], he took me to this condemned building, and it had a pizza oven and he crawled into the pizza oven and turned the heat on to 400 degrees or something like that, and he stayed in it for I guess a half hour. He came out, and except for one or two second-degree burns, he was unscathed. You meet a lot of musicians and filmmakers and actors, but it's rare to meet someone who can step inside a pizza oven and take the heat. I was intrigued by that.
Harmony Korine
Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.
Aldous Huxley
what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess...
Italo Calvino
Did he ever--try?'
Mingus shrugged. 'He was like you.'
What's that mean?'
Means he tried.'
Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn't matter, at the Windles' pond. So if had attuned to Robert Woolfolk's chaos.
Don't tell me,' said Dylan. 'He flew sideways.'
Mingus left it vague. He'd always made it his habit to protect their honor against one another--Dylan, Arthur, Robert. To say nothing.
Jonathan Lethem
And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink intoordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be...
Sylvia Plath
After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches. He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the prints as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed... cooperation from the world of objects.
Jonathan Franzen
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 knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.
William Gibson
God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean nothing.
Anne Lamott