Not Knowing Quotes (page 156)
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she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the...
Truman Capote
Laurel: I don't need a ring or a license, or a spetacular white dress. It's not marriage so much, or at all really, that matters. It's the promise. It's the knowing someone wants me to be part of his life. Someone loves me, that I'm the one for him. That's not just enough, it's everything.
Nora Roberts
So you're thinking you'd rather not hand me a pistol?'
'They're dangerous. And illegal. And Chekov is qa writer you can trust.'
'But this is not a story. We're talking about the real word.'
Tamaru narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Aomame. Then, slowly opening his mouth, he said 'Who knows?
Haruki Murakami
There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the...
Alan Paton
Stupid English."English isn't stupid," I say."Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me."Why not?"He says lunch isn't a subject."I glance at him. "It isn't."Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?
Jodi Picoult
The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.
Haruki Murakami
..he said, he didn't know what to do. He couldn't move forward. He thought, they should move on. He started crying. Not for himdelf, for her. He'd rescued her from her lousy life, and now he was throwing her back. He felt like a shit for doing it, for things having to be that way, for not being able to give her what she wanted. The last thing he wanted was to hurt her. The only part that wasn't in the manual, was her response: She started to laugh. "Oh, give me a break," she said.
Candace Bushnell
Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on: 'And how do you know that you're mad?'
'To begin with,' said the Cat, 'a dog's not mad. You grant that?'
'I suppose so,' said Alice.
'Well then,' the Cat went on, 'you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'
'I call it purring, not growling,' said Alice.
Lewis Carroll