Wishful Quotes (page 61)
The earth itself was unchangeable, the endless tracts of sand and water and pavement. It was the people, the perturbable madmen who roamed its surface, who viewed the world as transient and broken. Everett wished the earth could somehow reach up and still them, the crazy people, and invest them with its silence and permanence and depth.
Jonathan Lethem
Yet I liked him too much… way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn’t get to hurt me more than it did. Oh, he’s magnetic, he’s charming; you could fall into his eyes. Let’s face it: his sex appeal was unbearably strong. I wanted to know him—- the thoughts, the ideas behind the handsome, confident, wisecracking mask… then the friction increased, centered. His nearness was electric in itself. ‘Can’t you see,’ he said. ‘I want to kiss you.’ So he kissed me, hungrily, his eyes...
Sylvia Plath
Most of my friends are into strange things I don't really understand - and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn't change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family, and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington Fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?
Hunter S. Thompson
Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one, in the night, when anxiety does not let me sleep, I only know this one. And what is devilish in it seems to me quite clear. It is the vanity and the craving for enjoyment, which is forever whirring around oneself or even around someone else...and enjoying it. The wish that a naive person sometimes has: "I would like to die and watch others crying over me," is what such a writer constantly experiences: he dies (or he does not...
Franz Kafka
since we see everyday that where there is affection, young people are seldom withheld by immediate want of fortune from entering into engagements with each other, how can I promise to be wiser than so many of my fellow creatures if I am tempted, or how am I even to know that it would be wisdom to resist? All that I can promise you, therefore, is not to be in a hurry. I will not be in a hurry to believe myself his first object. When I am in company with him, I will not be wishing. In short, I...
Jane Austen
I wish there was a song called “Nguyen and Ari,” a little ditty about a hardworking Vietnamese girl who helps her parents withthe franchised Holiday Inn they run, and does homework in thelobby, and Ari, a hardworking Jewish boy who does volunteerwork at his grandmother’s old-age home, and they meet afterschool at Princeton Review. They help each other study for the. SATs and different AP courses, and then, after months of study-ing, and mountains of ashcards, they kiss chastely upon hear-ing...
Mindy Kaling
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?
At the very least we want a witness. We can't...
Margaret Atwood
The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast....Their art...
Isak Dinesen