“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
“Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.” Check out Optimism Quotes that will inspire you
“Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework.” Check out 20 Really Funny Religious Jokes
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.”
“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
“War is what happens when language fails.”
“A word after a word after a word is power.”
“Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.”
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.”
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“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”
“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
“There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
“Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.”
“Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.”
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
“I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea. ”
“There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.”
“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
“But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.”
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.”
“If he wants to be an asshole, it’s a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
“The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.”
“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
“How could I be sleeping with this particular man…. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.”
“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”
“And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn’t trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”
“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
“I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.”
“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.”
“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place,
you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”
“When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.”
“I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.”
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
“Sure, he says. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made.”
“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
“And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.”
“In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?”
“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.”
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