How Quotes (page 286)
Of course life frightens me sometimes. I don't happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. I'm going to give it hundred percent and go as far as I can. I'll take what I want and leave what I don't want. That's how I intend to live my life, and it things go bad, I'll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.
Haruki Murakami
It's your weakness gives them their strength. Mark how they dare not speak to me. A nameless horror has descended on you, keeping us apart. And yet why should this be? What have you lived through that I have not shared? Do you imagine that my mother's cries will ever cease ringing in my ears? Or that my eyes will ever cease to see her great sad eyes, lakes of lambent darkness in the pallor of it will ever cease ravaging my heart? But what matter? I am free. Beyond anguish, beyond remorse....
Jean-Paul Sartre
What do you want out of life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls. I don't know," she said. "Just wait on tables and try to get along." She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.
Jack Kerouac
I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.
George Saunders
You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you hadbeen as much used as myself to hear poor little children firstlearning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had everseen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and howtired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit ofseeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that totorment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonimouswords.
Jane Austen
What is a sentence. A sentence is left to be alright and therefor (sic) they are barely here. A day is additional with there having been with a condition of remaining all day which it is partly that they like to look about made it for them in reference as they knew that is whenever they met by the arrangement which had been made for them in the mean time. What is a sentence. They need not be having them made by them. in 'Sentences' chapter, p. 175 my edition, How to Write.
Gertrude Stein
in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I'll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight -- 'I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore' -- which evidently makes me...
David Foster Wallace
We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called monogamy. That's called civilization and its discontents.
Erica Jong