Maybe Quotes (page 81)
A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.
Salman Rushdie
Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
Joan Didion
We're lucky Esme thought to add an extra room. No one was planning for Ness-Renesmee."I frowned at him, my thoughts channeled down a less pleasant path."Not you too," I complained."Sorry, love. I hear it in their thoughts all the time, you know. It's rubbing off on me.I sighed. My baby, the sea serpent. Maybe there was no help for it. Well, I wasn't giving in.
Stephenie Meyer
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday. Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Man, he lives in jerks -- baby born an' a man dies, an' that's a jerkk -- gets a farm an' loses his farm, an' that's a jerk. Woman, it's all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain't gonna die out. People is goin' on -- changin' a little, maybe, but goin' right on.
John Steinbeck
I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. Maybe he did. I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin and they asked me if I believed in Satan...I had to think about that. I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief had waned somewhat. Now I'm startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no...
Cormac McCarthy