Like Me Quotes (page 171)
My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you.
Cormac McCarthy
With an exceedingly contemptuous expression, Idabel drew up to her full height. "Son," she said, and spit between her fingers, "what you've got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I've fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I'm a girl; you've got to remember that, or we can't never be friends." For all its bravado, she made this declaration with a special and compelling innocence; and when she knocked one fist against the other,...
Truman Capote
I have never had much need for companionship, unless it was the companionship of someone I could call a friend. Certainly I have seldom wished the conversation of strangers or the sight of strange faces. I believe rather that when I was alone I felt I had in some fashion lost my individuality; to the thrush and the rabbit I had been not Severian, but Man. The many people who like to be utterly alone, and particularly to be utterly alone in a wilderness, do so, I believe, because they enjoy...
Gene Wolfe
A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.
I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.
Christopher Isherwood
My Papa's Waltz: The whiskey on your breath. Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans. Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance. Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist. Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed. My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head. With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed. Still clinging to your shirt.
Theodore Roethke
I met a reverend mother once who cried...ah, it's all so sad' - 'What did she cry about?' - 'I don't know, after talking to me, I remember I said some silly thing like "the universe is a woman because it's round" but I think she cried because she was remembering her early days when she had a romance with some soldier who died, at least that's what they say, she was the greatest woman I ever saw, big blue eyes, big smart woman ... you could do that, get out of this awful mess and leave it all...
Jack Kerouac
The beautiful statue of Ganymede and the eagle looked like they had been molded out of white ceramic, and in Ganymede's outstretched arms it seemed to me a whole world was being embraced, a rushing world of gray sky and gray water where everything passed by so fast that you cnever got the chance to hold it, to touch it, to make it yours. Can't we keep anything?
Kim Stanley Robinson
If thou could'st empty all thyself of self, like to a shell dishabited, then might He find thee on the ocean shelf, and say "This is not dead," and fill thee with Himself instead. But thou art all replete with very thou and hast such shrewd activity, that when He comes He says, "This is enow unto itself-'twere better let it be, it is so small and full, there is no room for Me.
Thomas Browne
When there came a sound that I'd never heard the like of in all my born days. Eh, I won't forget that. The whole air was full of it, loud as thunder but far longer, cool and sweet as music over water but strong enough to shake the woods. And I said to myself, 'If that's not the Horn, call me a rabbit.
C. S. Lewis
I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk.
David Foster Wallace