Wanted Quotes (page 494)
We can never know what we want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. [...] And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, 'sketch' is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
Milan Kundera
Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.
Chuck Klosterman
I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself. My neck and teeth began to ache, and I was not at all sure I really wanted to live with that stuff inside me. But holding onto them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live--and clinging to that decision.
Dorothy Allison
love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. if you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. but in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. it will not be broken; it will become impenetrable, irredeemable...to love is to be vulnerable
C. S. Lewis
World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. Everything enters something else. My days spill into light-years. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.
Don DeLillo