• 34 — milan kundera the book of laughter and forgetting
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

the future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destro or repaint it. we want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.

you know what happens when two people talk. one of them speaks and the other breaks in: "it's absolutely the same with me, i... " and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own "it's absolutely the same with me, i ..." ... because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

"that's right! looked at from the outside, i haven't experienced anything. looked at from the outside! but i have a feeling that my experience inside is worth writing about and could be interesting to everybody."

i often have the impression my whole body is filled with the desire to express itself. to speak. to make itself heard. sometimes i think i'm going crazy, because i'm so bursting with it i have an urge to scream, you certainly must know about that, mr. banaka. i want to express my life and my feelings, which i know are absolutely original, but when i sit down in front of a piece of paper, i suddenly don't know anymore what to write. then i think it must be about technique.

"you may be a great poet, but you're a small man! i can say you're great poet, but you don't have the right to say it."

when papa could speak normally, i had asked him very few questions. now i wanted to make up for lost time. so we talked about music, but it was a strange conversation, between someone who knew nothing but a great many words and one who know everything but not a single word.

only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a continual interrogation. i don't know a better definition of love.

man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. much more unbearable for him to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach.

whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come their own accord! memories are scattared all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge!

love is a privilege, and all privileges are undeserved and must be paid for.

• 35 — louisa may alcott little women
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

"i like good strong words that mean something."

never had the sun risen so beautifully, and never had the world seemed so lovely.

"ive thought a great deal lately about my 'bundle of naughties,' and being selfish is the largest one on it; so i'm going to try hard to cure it, if i can. beth isn't selfish, and that's the reason everyone loves her and feels so bad at the thought of losing her. people wouldn't feel half so bad about me if i was sick, and i don't deserve to have them; but i'd like to be loved and missed by a great many friend, so i'm going to try and be like beth all i can. i'm apt to forget my resolutions; but if i had something always about me to remind me, i guess i should do better."

• 36 — j. g. ballard the drowned world
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆
• 37 — klaus mann mephisto
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

"no one who refuses the challenge of hamlet deserves to be an actor."

there are millions of youths like miklas running about in this country. what comes first with them is hatred, which is good because it is directed at the prevailed state of affairs. but then a person like that has the bad luck to fall into the hands of men who pervert his positive hatred.

"why are you looking at me like that?" asked barbara finally, when it seemed that hendrik's spellbound glance would never leave her face. "shouldn't i?" he answered sofly.

there is so much that's bad in me. alone i can't muster the force to get the better of it. but you will make what is best in me strong.

"when you have witnessed those horrors, you have one choice," he said. "you can either kill yourself or go back to work with greater dedication than before." he went back to work.

• 38 — plato the symposium
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

to say 'i love x' is somehow really to say 'x inspires love in me'.

love may be a cosmical force, but in human beings it is a longing for lost happiness.

the reason they're attracted to the most unintelligent people imaginable is that all they're after is the satisfaction of their desires and they don't care whether or not those desires are properly satisfied.

it was their very essence that had been split in two, so each half missed its other half and tried to be with it; they threw their arms around each other in an embrace and longed to be grafted together. as a result, because they refused to do anything without their other halves, they died of starvation and general apathy. if one of a pair died while the other half was left alife, the survivor went in search of another survivor to embrace.

"do you also think that lack of knowledge is the same as ignorance? haven't you noticed that there's middle ground between knowledge and ignorance?" "what middle ground?" "true belief."

"stop insisting, then, that 'not attractive' is the same as 'repulsive', or that 'not good' is the same as 'bad'. and then you'll also stop thinking that, just because - as you have conceded - love isn't good or attractive, he therefore has to be repulsive and bad. he might fall between these extremes"

no god loves knowledge or desires wisdom, because gods are already wise; by the same token, no one else who is wise loves knowledge. on the other hand, ignorant people don't love knowledge or desire wisdom either, because the trouble with ignorance is precisely that if a person lacks virtue and knowledge, he's perfectly satisfied with the way he is.

love is bound, therefore, to love knowledge, and anyone who loves knowledge is bound to fall between knowledge and ignorance.

• 39 — stephenie meyer twilight
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

sometimes i wondered if i was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. maybe there was a glitch in my brain.

"so you faint at the sight of blood" he asked. this seemed to entertain him.

i watched tv with charlie after dinner, for something to do. there wasn't anything i wanted to watch, but he knew i didn't like baseball, so he turned it to some mindless sitcom that neither of us enjoyed. he seemed happy, though, to be doing something together. and it felt good, despite my depression, to make him happy.

"you really shouldn't do that to people," i criticized. "it's hardly fair." "do what?" "dazzle them like that - she's probably hyperventilating in the kitchen right now." he seemed confused. "oh, come on," i said dubiously. "you have to know the effect you have on people." he tilted his head to one side, and his eyes were curious. "i dazzle people?" "you haven't noticed? do you think everybody gets their way so easily?" he ignored my questions. "do i dazzle you" "frequently?", i admitted.

"drunk?" i objected. "you're intoxicated by my very presence." he was grinning that playful smirk again.

"twilight, again," he murmured. "another ending. no matter, how perfect the day is, it always has to end."

• 40 — anxious people fredrik backman
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

the truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the internet, they wouldn't spend so much damn time on the internet, because no one who's having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves.

"sweetie, you aren't that hard to read. people like you are never as complicated as you'd like to be, especially not if you've been to a university. your generation don't want to study a subject, you just want to study yourselves."

if you can do something for someone in such a way they think that they managed it all on their own, then you've done a good job.

• 41 — f. scott fitzgerald beautiful and damned
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

"a man knowing too much for his talent to express. like me. suppose, for instance, i have more wisdom than you, and less talent. it would tend to make me inarticulate. you, on the contrary, have enough water to fill the pail and a big enough pail to hold the water.!

"i don't think that's right. if i hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. i dont't like this kiss-and-forget."

"mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and - and in love before they're born."

i want to marry anthony, because husbands are to often 'husbands' and i must marry a lover.

"you know these new novels make me tired. my god! everywhere i go some silly girl asks me if i've read 'this side of paradise'."

• 42 — gustave flaubert madame bovary
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

she loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. she needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart, - being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes.

and that time she worshipped mary stuart and felt an ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-fated woman.

perhaps she would have liked to confide in someone about all these things. but how does one express an uneasiness so intangible, one that changes shape like a cloud, that changes direction like the wind? she lacked words, the occasion, the courage.

• 43 — george orwell animal farm
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆
• 44 — george orwell 1984
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆
• 45 — isaac asimov foundation
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆
• 46 — johann wolfgang von goethe faust
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

that art is long, and human life so short!

the essence of medicine's easily grasped: you study nature, you study man, but in the end you let things take the course god wills. it's pointless to waste time by being scientific - you learn only as much as you possibly can; but if you profit from your opportunities you're a made man. you have a rather pleasing figure, too, and no doubt the assurance to go with it, so if you only have self-confidence, others will place their confidence in you.

i never could adapt to people. when i'm with them i feel so insignificant; i'll never be at ease at all.

one look or word from you is far more entertaining than all the wisdom of this world.

"all's over!" - what's the inference from that? that things might just as well have never been, but chase around in circles as if they did exist. i'd much prefer eternal emptiness instead.

• 47 — j. r. r. tolkien o senhor dos anéis: as duas torres
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

um grande cavalo cinza-escuro foi trazido para aragorn, e ele o montou. "hasufel é seu nome", informou éomer. "que te carregue bem e para melhor sorte que a gárulf, seu falecido dono!"

porém sentia no coração que faramir, apesar de muito semelhante ao irmão no aspecto, era um homem menos autocentrado, ao mesmo tempo mais severo e mais sábio.

"sim, senhor, e mostraste tuas qualidades: as mais elevadas." faramir sorriu. "um empregado atrevido, mestre samwise. mas não: o louvor dos louváveis está acima de toda recompensa. porém não havia nisto nada para ser louvado. não tive fascínio, nem desejo de fazer diferente do que fiz." "ah, bem, senhor," respondeu Sam, "disseste que meu patrão tinha um ar élfico; e isso foi bom e verdadeiro. mas posso dizer isto: tu também tens um ar, senhor, que me faz lembrar de, de - bem, galdalf, de magos."

"ora, é de pensar que ainda estamos na mesma história! ela ainda continua. as grandes histórias não terminam nunca?" "não, nunca terminam enquanto histórias," disse frodo. "mas as pessoas nelas vêm e vão quando seu papel acabou. nosso papel vai acabar mais tarde - ou mais cedo." ... "eu me pergunto", repetiu frodo. "mas não sei. e é esse o jeito das histórias de verdade. pegue qualquer uma de que você goste. você pode saber ou adivinhar que tipo de história é, de final feliz ou final triste, mas as pessoas que estão nela não sabem. e você não quer que elas saibam."

• 48 — virginia woolf a room of one's own
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

but the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. one does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew.

any woman born with a great gift in the sixteen century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.

yes, one feels, i should never have thought that this could be so; i have never known people behaving like that. but you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens.

suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts of shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!

intellectual freedom depends upon material things. poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. and women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.

therefore i would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. by hook or by crook, i hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

now the writer, as i think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. it is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

• 49 — albert camus the stranger
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

i hadn't understood hwo days could be long and short at the same time: long to live through, but so drawn out that they ened up flowing into one antoher. they lost their names. only the words "yesterday and "tomorrow" still had any meaning for me.

in any case, i may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but i was absolutely sure about what didn't.

"no, i refuse to believe you! i know that at one time or another you've wished for another life." i said of course i had, but it didn't mean any more than wishing to be rich, to be able to swim faster, or to have a more nicely shaped mouth. it was all the same. but he stopped me and wanted to know how i pictured this other life. then i shouted at him, "one where i could remember this life!" and that's when i told him i'd had enough.

• 50 — ernest hemingway the old man and the sea
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

it is better to be lucky. but i'd rather be exact. then when luck comes you are ready.

"age is my alarm clock," the old man said. "why do old man wake so early? is it to have a longer day?"

• 51 — allen ginsberg howl, kaddish, and other poems
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

we're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside.

money! money! money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion! money made of nothing starvation, suicide! money of failure! money of death!

endless cycles of conflict happening in nothingness make it impossible to grap for the perfection, which does not exist, but is not necessary, so everything is final and ocurs over & over again til we will finally blank out as expected.

• 52 — j. r. r. tolkien o senhor dos anéis: o retorno do rei
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

de repente faramir mexeu-se, abriu os olhos e olhou para aragorn, inclinado sobre ele; e uma luz de conhecimento e amor se acendeu em seus olhos, e falou baixinho: "meu senhor, vós me chamastes. eu vim. o que o rei ordena?"

"estou contente de você estar aqui comigo," disse frodo. "aqui no fim de todas as coisas, sam."

faramir encontrou-se com aragorn no meio dos que estavam ali reunidos, ajoelhou-se e disse: "o último regente de gondor pede permissão para entregar seu cargo." e ele estendeu um bastão branco; mas aragorn tomou o bastão e devolveu, dizendo: "esse cargo não findou e há de ser teu e dos teus herdeiros enquanto durar minha linhagem. agora cumpre teu dever!" então faramir pôs-se de pé e falou em voz nítida: "homens de gondor, ouvi agora o regente deste reino! eis que veio aquele que finalmente volta a reivindicar a realeza. eis aragorn, filho de arathorn, chefe dos dúnedain de arnor, capitão da hoste do oeste, portador da estrela do norte, o que empunha a espada reforjada, vitorioso em batalha, cujas mãos trazem cura, o pedra-éfica, elessar da linhagem de valandil, filho de isildur, filho de elendil de númenor. há ele de ser rei e entrar na cidade e ali habitar?" e toda hoste e todo o povo gritaram "sim" com uma só voz.

• 53 — chelsea g. summers a certain hunger
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

orgasms are a dime a dozen. any old human woman can see a man orgasm. we so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.

writers say this kind of thing all the time, but to me writing is like drinking or eating food. writing sustains me. i don't know who i am if i don't write. more important, you don't know who i am. if i don't tell my story, it's as if i've died. i'm in prison for life. and i'm not going to die early.

the only people to whom a lifestyle comes naturally are the very rich or the exceptionally famous. everyone else is just trying to hardscrabble an existence about which they don't feel an unendurable level of shame.

"this," she said, "is what a woman wears instead of armor. you put on the right makeup, and you look invincible. you feel like a warrior. you will still be a woman, but you will wear this on the outside so that on the inside, you will stand as tall as a man. do you understand?"

kill one man and you're an oddity. kill a few and you're a legend.

it does mean, however, that i'm aware of the choices i'm making. i try to make good choices. i fail. i live to eat another day.

our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because - and this is the meat of the matter - it's hard work to be a woman. it's a full-time job. our female friends, the close ones, are the mini-breaks we take from the totalitarian work it requires to keep up the performance of being female.

one thing i've learned since college is that few men will suck your toes. those who will are men of uncommon bravery, vision, and appetite. you don't let them just wander off to eat street meat.

i can't tell this story without talking about alex, yet i don't want to share him.

i like being by myself, you see. i just didn't want to be alone. and now i never will be.

• 54 — walt whitman leaves of grass
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

you may read in many languages, yet read nothing about it.

all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it, all music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.

the words of true poems give you more than poems, they give you to form yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life and every thing else.

• 55 — os manuscritos perdidos de charlotte bronte
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆
• 56 — charlotte bronte jane eyre
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

to this crib i always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, i contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. it puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity i doated on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. i could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gow; and when it lay there safe and warm, i was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.

even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

"if all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends." "no; i know i should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if others don't love me i would rather die than live - i cannot bear to be solitary and hated ... helen. looke here; to gain some real affection from you, or miss temple, or any other whom i truly love, i would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest-"

"he is not to them what he is to me," i thought: "he is not of their kind. i believe he is of mine; - i am sure he is - i feel akin to him - i understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, i have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nevers, that assimilates me mentally to him ... i say that i am of his kind, i do not mean that i have his force to influence, and his spell to attract; i mean only that i have certain tastes and feelings in common with him. i must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered: and yet, while i breathe and think, i must love him."

"you are cold; you are sick; and you are silly."

presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key. i never laughed at presentiments in my life, because i have had strange ones of my own. sympathies, i believe, existe (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. and signs, for aught we know, may be but sympathies of nature with man.

"i cannot see my prospects clearly tonight, sir: and i hardly know what thoughts i have in my head. everything in life seems unreal." "except me: i am substancial enough - touch me."

"do as i do: trust in god and yourself. believe in heaven. hope to meet again there."

"i care for myself. the more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained i am, the more i will respect myself. i will keep the law given by god; sanctioned by man. i will hold to the principles received by me when i was sane, and not mad - as i am now. laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and sould rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. if at my individual convenience i might break them, what would be their worth? they have a worth - so i have always believed; and i cannot believe it now, it is because i am insane - quite insane: with my veins running fire, andn my heart beating faster than i can count its throbs. preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all i have at this hour to stand by: there i plant my foot."

i know from experience. god has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get - when our will strains after a path we may not follow - we need neither starve from inantion, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longer to taste - and perhaps purer; and to her out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.

all the sunshine i can feel is in her presence.

• 57 — milan kundera immortality
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

bettina, however, wanted to talk about the starts of lovers, not the stars of astronomers, and so when she put the telescope to her eye she deliberately failed to see anything and declared that telescope wasn't strong enough for her.

today it really made her angry: the preposition ohne (without) takes the accusative case, the preposition mi (with) takes the dative. why?

bernard had always longed to be the one who asked questions, not the one who has to answer. fame belongs to the one who answers, not the one who asks.

and you that i won't be satisfied with just a little. i won't watch the misery of my life. i have too high a conception of life. either life gives me everything, or i'll quit.

i find the crux of human condition: our heads are full of dreams, but our behinds drag us down like an anchor.

she thought of him and smiled. and suddenly it occured to her that her father was her only love. yes, it was quite clear: her father was her only love.

for her, the world was becoming mute and ceasing to be her world. she was completely locked into herself and her suffering. at least, could the sight of the suffering of others tear her out of her isolation? no. because the suffering of others was taking in a world she had lost, a world no longer hers. if the planet mars were nothin but one huge ball of suffering, where every stone cried out in pain, it would not be able to move us to compassion, because mars does not belong to our world. a person who finds himself outside the world is not sensitive to the world's suffering.

living, there is no happiness in that. living: carrying one's painful self through the world. but being, being is happiness. being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

your life will always be built from the same materials, the same bricks, the same problems, and what will seem to you ate first "a new life" will soon turn out to be just a variation of your old existence.

• 58 — sylvia plath the bell jar
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

the trouble was, i had been inadequate all along, i simply hadn't thought about it.

"if neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then i'm neurotic as hell. i'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."

then i knew what the trouble was. i needed experience. how could i write about life when i'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?

• 59 — t. s. eliot the waste land and other poems
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

the love song of j. alfred prufrock.

you are invulnerable. you have no achilles' heel.

regard the moon. la lune ne garde aucune rancune.

• 60 — stephenie meyer new moon
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

it was depressing to realize that i wasn't the heroine anymore, that my story was over.

i was like a lost moon - my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation - that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.

i was addicted to the sound of my delusions. it made things worse if i went without them.

before you, bella, my life was like a moonless night. very dark, but there were stars - points of life and reason... and then you shot across my sky like a meteor. suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliance, there was beauty.

• 61 — william shakespeare hamlet
  • ⤹ ★★★★★
• 62 — hermann hesse narcissus and goldmund
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are almost always superior to us creatures of the mind.

we are not meant to come together, not any more than sun and moon were meant to come together, or sea and land. we are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. it is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.

i want to live and roam, to feel summer and winter, experience the world, taste its beauty and its horrors.

you spoke of 'basic images', of images that exist nowhere except in the creative mind, but which can be realized and made visible in matter. long before a figure becomes visible and gains reality, it exists as an image in the artist's soul. this image then, this 'basic image', is exactly what the old philosophers call an 'idea'.

for you, the world was made of images, for me of ideas. i always told you that you were not made to be a thinker, and i also told you that this was no lack since, in exchange, you were a master in the realm of images.

we thinkers try to come closer to god by pulling the mask of the world away from his face. you come closer to him by loving his creation and re-creating it. both are human endeavors, and necessarily imperfect, but art is more innocent.

• 63 — napoleon hill think and grow rich
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

that is one of the tricks of opportunity. it has a sly habit of slipping in by the back door, and often it comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat. perhaps this is why so many fail to recognize opportunity.

no one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality.

one of the strange things about human beings is that they value only that which has price.

"the greatest among ye shall be servant of all."

when driven by his desire to please a woman, based solely upon the emotion of sex, a man may be, and usually is, capable of great achievement, but his actions may be disorganized, distorted, and totally destructive. when driven by his desire to please a woman, based upon the motive of sex alone, a man may steal, cheat, and even commit murder. but when the emotion of love is mixed with the emotion of sex, the same man will guide his actions with more sanity, balance and reason.

one who has loved truly, can never lose entirely.

telepathy and clairvoyance are really one and the same gift. that is, the faculty that 'sees' a card down on a table seems to be exactly the same one that 'reads' a thought residing in another mind.

you have one asset as great as the richest man living - and that is time.

• 64 — bernard werber empire of the ants
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

wasn't there a chinese proverb that said: someone who asks a question is stupid for five minutes but someone who doesn't ask is stupid for life?

'my body's getting older but my head's getting younger.'

ant: what does 'love' mean? human being: possibly that we had the same scents.

• 65 — virginia woolf mrs. dalloway
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

sentia-se muito jovem; ao mesmo tempo indizivelmente velha. ela cortava tudo como uma faca; ao mesmo tempo estava de fora, olhando. tinha uma perpétua sensação, ao olhar os táxis, de estar fora, fora, longe no mar e sozinha; sempre tivera a sensação que era muito, muito perigoso viver um dia que fosse. não que se considerasse inteligente, ou muito incomum.

essa suscetibilidade a impressões era o seu ponto fraco, sem dúvida. na sua idade, ele ainda tinha, como um menino, ou mesmo uma menina, essas alternâncias de humor; dias bons, dias ruins, sem absolutamente nenhuma razão, felicidade diante de um rosto bonito, desgraça total diante do desleixo.

sua aparência estava um tanto enrugada, porém mais amável, ela sentiu, e tinha genuíno afeto por ele, porque estava ligado à sua juventude, e ainda guardava um pequeno emily bronte que lhe dera, e ele ia escrever, com certeza? naquela época, ele ia escrever.

• 66 — f. scott fitzgerald the love of the last tycoon
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

he was born sleepless without a talent for rest or the desire for it.

"when i'm with you i don't breathe quite right," she said.

"forgotten me with your head perhaps. but i knew the first time i saw you that you were the kind that likes me-"

"i don't want to lose you now," he said, "i don't know what you think of me or wheter you think of me at all. as you've probably guessed my heart's in the grave-" he hesitated, wondering if this was quite true, "-but you're the most attractive woman i've ever met since i don't know when. i can't stop looking at you. i don't know now exactly the color of yuor eyes but they make me sorry for everyone in the world-"

"i don't want my name on the screen because credit is something that should be given to others. if you are in position to give credit to yourself then you do not need it."

• 67 — chuck palahniuk clube da luta
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆
• 68 — leo tolstoy anna karenina
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

he stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

'but that's the aim of civilization: to make everything an enjoyment.'

'understand,' he said, 'that it isn't love. i've been in love, but this is not the same. this is not my feeling but some external force taking possession of me. i left because i decided it could not be, you understand, like a happiness that doesn't exist on earth but i have struggled with myself and i see that without it there is no life.'

'you're a very wholesome man. that is your virtue and your defect. you have a wholesome character, and you want all of life to be made up of wholesome phenomena, but that doesn't happen. so you despise the activity of public service because you want things always to correspond to their aim, and that doesn't happen. you also want the activity of the individual man always to have an aim, that love and family life always be one. and that doesn't happen. all the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.'

anna karenina read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. she wanted too much to live herself. when she read about the heroine of the novel taking care of a suck man, she wanted to walk with inaudible steps around the sick man's room; when she read about a memeber of parliament making a speech, she wanted to make that speech; when she read about how lady mary rode to hounds, teasing her sister-in-law and surprising everyone with her courage, she wanted to do it herself. but there was nothing to do, and so, fingering the smooth knife with her small hands, she forced herself to read.

'i think that in order to know love one must make a mistake and then correct it.'

they've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us - there is no life.

she was telling the truth. whenever, at whatever moment, she might be asked what she was thinking about, she could answer without mistake: about the same thing, about her happiness and unhappiness.

he soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. it showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.

'i envy him for being better than i am,' said levin, smiling. 'he doesn't live for himself. his whole life is subordinated to duty. and therefore he can be calm and satisfied.'

'no, that's another question. i'm prepared to admit they're useful. but any acquisition that doesn't correspond to the labour expended is dishonest.'

you haven't told me yet how and what you think of me, and i want to know everything. but i'm glad you'll see me as i am. above all, i wouldn't want people to think that i want to prove anything. i don't want to prove anything, i simply want to life; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. i have that right, haven't i?

anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.

if the good has a cause, it is no longer the good; if it has a consequence - a reward - it is also not the good. therefore the good is outside the chain of cause and effect. 'and i know it, and we all know it.'

'what would i be and how would i live my life, if i did not have those beliefs, did not know that one should live for god and not for one's need? i would rob, lie, kill. nothing of what constitutes the main joys of my life would exist for me.' and, making the greatest efforts of imagination, he was still unable to imagine the beastly being that he himself would be if he did not know what he lived for. 'i sought an answer to my question. but the answer to my question could not come from thought, hich is incommensurable with the question. the answer was given by life itself, in my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. and i did not acquire that knowledge through anything, it was given to me as it is to everyone, given because i could not take it from anywhere'.

'the people cannot help knowing. a consciousness of their destiny always exists among the people, and in such moments as the present it becomes clear to them.'

'no, did i say i felt nothing? i only said i was disappointed.' 'what, dissapointed in him?' 'not in him but in my own feeling. i expected more. i expected that a new, pleasant feeling would blossom in me like a surprise. and suddenly, instead of that, there was squeamishness, pity...'

• 69 — kitty thomas tender mercies
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆

but you will give me everything. you won't give it because you're afraid of me. you'll give it because you're grateful and because you trust me. i don't care how long it takes us to get to that point. but we will get there.

• 70 — milan kundera laughable loves
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

as if you didn't now that ninety-nine percent of all statements are idle talk. don't you yourself talk mostly just for the sake of talking?"

rather, it's a question of cultivating one's own demanding taste, because in it is mirrored the extent of one's personal worth. remember, my friend, that a real fisherman throws the little fish back into the water.

"if i did not believe that i am living for something more than just my own life, i probably couldn't live at all." ... "that's not the question at all, eduard. one doesn't live for oneself. one always lives for something." she looked deeply into his eyes: "but it's a matter of knowing for what. for something real or something fictitious? god is a beautiful idea. but the future of man, eduard, is a reality. and i have lived for reality; i have sacrificed everything for reality."

but this is how life goes: a man imagines that he is playing his role in a particular play, and he does not suspect that in the meantime they have changed the scenery without his noticing, and he unknowingly find himself in the middle of a rather different performance.

• 71 — sylvia plath ariel
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

dying is an art, like everything else. i do it exceptionally well. i do it so it feels like hell. i do it so it feels real. i guess you could say i've a call. it's easy enough to do it in a cell. it's easy enough to do it and stay put. it's the theatrical.

i rise with my red hair and i eat men like air.

but how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes? mirror can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms in which a torture goes on one can only watch. the face that live in this mirror is the face of a dead man. do not worry about the eyes.

if the moon smiled, she would resemble you.

• 72 — donna tartt the secret history
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

it seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

i am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

"why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?" he said, looking round the table. "could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls."

"if we attempt to order events too meticulously, to arrive at point x via a logical trail, it follows that the logical trail can be picked at point x and followed back to us. reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. but luck? it's invisible, erratic, angelic. what could possibly be better, from our point of view, than allowing bunny to choose the circumstances of his own death?"

"when you're worried about something," said henry abruptly, "have you ever tried thinking in a different language?" "what?" "it slows you down. keeps your thoughts from running wild. a good discipline in any circumstance. or you might try doing what the buddhists do.

"well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? i think they make it ugly on purpose. and people buy it out of sheer perversity."

"anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale."

viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. if you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand.

• 73 — virginia woolf to the lighthouse
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

and all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be, are full of trees and changing leaves.

yes. she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, i have had my vision.

• 74 — milan kundera the joke
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

i told her i'd be glad to go to the movies with her anytime she was free. she said she'd rather go alone.

i do see things as they are, but in addition to these visible things i see the invisible. it's not for nothing that fantasy exists.

because being brave in solitude, without witnesses, without the reward of others's approbation, face to face with himself, that took great pride and strength.

i want to know you, helena. i want to know everything about you. the more i know you, the more you'll be mine.

because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell.

• 75 — antonia fraser mary queen of scots
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

on the principle of the sunflower and the sun, a frail child naturally rewards a more healthy specimen of the race with its admiration; a younger child hero worships an older one; an unattractive child responds to a beautiful one by loving it. on all these counts, it was natural for francis to ove mary stuart, even if he had not been heavily encouraged to do so. as it is, the constant reiteration of tales of his somewhat pathetic passion for her, from many sources, make it certain that his adoration for her was indeed genuine, and not just the projection of courtly wishful thinking.

furtthermore, as a character, mary responded exceptionally easily to love all her life. she was used to being loved in the wildest sense, since her childhood; she desired to continued being loved, since it was a state she enjoyed; where she saw love, or thought she saw it, she found it easy to bestow her own generous affections in return.

mary was exactly the sort of beautiful woman, not precisely brilliant, but well-educated and chaarming, who inspired and stimulated poets by her presence to feats of homage, which were also able to take their place in the annals of literature.

mary on the other hand was by nature frank and open, as she knew herself; she was also passionate, quick to love, quick to hate, easy to weep, easy to laugh.

'god forgive me, and god knit us together for ever for the most faithful couple that he did knit together. this is my faith. i will die in it.'

a lioness with a whelp and the motto unum quidem sed leonem.

'god, like the good father of a family, distributes his talents among his children, and whoever receives them and puts them out of profit is discharged and excused from eternal suffering.'

'as a sinner, i am truly concious of having often offended my creator, and i beg him to forgive me, but as queen and sovereign, i am aware of no fault or offence for which i have to render account to anyone here below.'

'as an absolute queen, i cannot submit to orders, nor i can submit to the laws of the land without injury to myself, the king my son and all sovereign princes. ... for myself i do not recognize the laws of england nor do i know or understand them as i have asserted.

'look to your consciences and remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of england.'

• 76 — william shakespeare much ado about nothing
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

there's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord. she is never sad but when she sleeps, and not ever sad then; for i have heard my daughter say she hath often dreamt of unhappiness and waked herself with laughing.

• 77 — marcel proust in the shadow of young girls in flower
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

for when it is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to receive certain impressions from nature or from art, we have certain scruple about allowing our soul to gather, instead of these, other, inferior impressions that are liable to make us form a false estimate of the exact value of beauty.

i felt, all the same, when the curtain had fallen, disappointed that the pleasure for which i had so longed had been no greater, but at the same time i felt the need to prolong it, not to leave forever, on coming out of the theater, this life of the stage that had, for a few hours, been my own.

for it is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly on what scale our words or our gestures are apparent to others. partly from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also because we enlarge to enormous proportions the filed over which the impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are obliged to extend, we imagine that the accessories of our speech and attitudes scarcely penetrate the consciousness, still less remain in the memory of those with whom we converse.

but perhaps it was simply that swann knew that generosity is often no more than the inner aspect that our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

we are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to an accident, the most simple in appearance and the one that may at any moment occur, a seriousness that the accident by itself would not entail. what makes us so happy is the presence in our heart of an unstable element that we perpetually contrive to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. in reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering that happiness neutralizes, makes potential only, postpones, but that may at any moment become what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, sheer agony.

but if our unhappiness is due to the loss of someone dear to us, our suffering consists merely in an unusually vivid comparison of the present with the past.

we construct our lives for one person, and when at length we are ready to receive her, that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, a prisoner within the walls that were intended only for her.

in the human race the frequency of the virtues that are identical in us all is not more wonderful than the multiplicity of the defects that are peculiar to each one of us. undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is "the commonest thing in the world"; it is human kindness.

'this is where mary stuart used to say her prayers; now it's where i keep my brooms.'

"after all," i said to myself, "perhaps the pleasure one found in writing it is not the infallible test of the literary value of a fine page; it may be only an accessory state that is often superadded to that value, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning."

when the successive hours of our life unfold thius on too widely dissimilar planes, we find that we give away too much of ourselves to all sorts of people who the next day will not interest us the least. but we feel that we are still responsible for what we said to them overnight, and that we must honor our promises.

"when the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. so long as you divert your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances, because you will not have grasped their true nature. if a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. one must have a thorough understanding of one's dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one's dreams from one's life that so often produces good results that i wonder whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons maintain that, to avoid the rist of appendicitis later on, we ought all to have our appendices taken out when we are children."

pleasure in this respect is like photography. what we take in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative that we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inned darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.

• 78 — françoise sagan bonjour tristesse
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

but after all, i thought, why should i stand in judgement over myself? i was who i was, so had i not the right to experience events in whatever way i wished?

but i had suddenly now glimpsed the whole marvelous mechanism of human reflexes and all the power of language. what a pity that this had come about in the service of untruthfu! one day i would love someone with a passionate love and i would seek out a way to him, just like that, cautiously, gently and with trembling hand.

i kissed him passionately, i wanted to hurt him, to leave my mark on him so that he would not be able to forget me for one instant that evening and would dream of me that night.

'it doesn't matter. i love you enough to make you share my opinion of you. i love you, i love you so much.'

i looked at him: i had never loved him. i had found him kind and attractive; i had loved the pleasure he gave me; but i did not need him.

• 79 — françoise sagan bonjour tristesse
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

in any case, it's better to credit others with having virtues than to admit having faults yourself.

i understood why proust speaks at such length of albertine's cheeks.

'you'll see. once the decision has been made, it's fine. the difficulty is when one clings on.'

• 80 — françoise sagan aimez-vouz brahms...
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

he preferred having been unhappy for a worthwhile reason to being happy for a poor one.

"i'd give two years of my life to be in love with someone."

"to love is nothing," simon told her, speaking of himself, "one must also be loved."

• 81 — william golding lord of the flies
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆
• 82 — oscar wilde the picture of dorian gray
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

the ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. they can sit at their ease and gape at the play. if they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. they live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet.

the only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice last a little longer.

'i am not laughing, dorian; at least i am not laughinga t you. but you should say the greatest romance of your life. you should say the first romance of your life. you will always be loved, and you will alwyas be in love with love. a grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. that is the one use of the idle classes of a country. don't be afraid. there are exquisite things in store for you. this is merely the beginning.'

'to be good is to be in harmony with one's self', he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. 'discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. one's own life - that is the important thing. as for the lives of one's neighbour, if one wishes to be a prig or a puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. besides, individualism has really the higher aim. modern morality consist in accepting the standard of one's age. i consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immortality.'

but it appeared to dorian gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.'

he knew that the senses, no less tan the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.

each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it. the only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. one had to pay over and over again, indeed. in her dealings with man Destiny never closed her accounts.

'every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. to be popular one must be a mediocrity.'

'how can you say that? romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into art. beside, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. difference of object does not alter singlenes of passion. it merely intensifies it. we can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.'

knowledge would be fatal. it is the uncertainty that charms one.

'the world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. the curves of your lips rewrite history.'

• 83 — stephenie meyer eclipse
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

"i think that may be the point," i disagreed. "their love is their only redeeming quality."

"the way you move - you orient yourself around him without even thinking about it. when he moves, even a little bit, you adjust your position at the same time. like magnets... or gravity. you're like a... satellite, or something. i've never seen anything like it."

• 84 — marguerite duras the lover
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

what i want to seem i do seem, beautiful too if that's what people want me to be. beautiful or pretty, pretty for the family for example, for the family no more than that. i can become anything anyone wants me to be. and believe it. believe i'm charming too. and when i believe it, and it becomes true for anyone seeing me who wants me to be according to his taste, i know that too.

i've never written, though i thought i wrote, never loved, though i thought i loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

and i have nothing like that. my mother says: this one will never be satisfied with anything. i think i'm beginning to see my life. i think i can already say, i have a vague desire to die. from now on i treat that word and my life as inseparable. i think i have a vague desire to be alone, just as i realize i've never been alone any more since i left childhood behind, and the family of the hunter. i'm going to write. that's what i see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.

• 85 — gabriel garcia marquez one hundred years of solitude
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

"things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "it's simply a matter of waking up their souls."

• 86 — matt haig the midnight library
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

'icosagon,' she told him. 'what?' 'the quiz. earlier. the twenty-sided polygon. well, a twenty-sided polygon is called an icosagon. i knew the answer but didn't tell you because i didn't want you to mock me. and now i don't really care because i don't think me knowing some things that you don't should bother you. and also, i am going to the bathroom.'

she realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. as thoreau wrote, 'it's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.'

• 87 — eve babitz slow days, fast company: the world, the flesh, and l.a.
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

i wonder if i'll ever be able to have what i like or if my tastes are too be sustained by one if anything.

• 88 — v. e. shwab the invisible life of addie larue
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

what she needs are stories. stories are a way to preserve one's self. to be remembered. and to forget. stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in pantings, poems, films. and books. books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives - or to find strength in a very long one.

"i do not want to belong to anyone but myself. i want to be free. free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and i am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. i do not want to die as i've loved which is no life at all. i-"

"you don't like it?" henry flashes a hollow smile. "it's fine," he says, shifting in his seat. "just a little slow" it's hitchcock, she wants to say, but instead she whispers, "it's worth it, i promise."

"small places make for small lives. and some people are fine with that. they like knowing where to put their feet. but if you only walk in other people's steps, you cannot make your own way. you cannot leave a mark."

"what's his name?" she asks. "sinatra."

• 89 — osamu dazai no longer human
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

i know that i am liked by other people, but i seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others.

• 90 — fyodor dostoevsky crime and punishment
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

do you suppose i'm going on like this because they talk nonsense? rubbish! i like it when they talk nonsense! talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. it's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! i talk nonsense, therefore i'm human. not one single truth has ever been arrived at without people first having talked a dozen reams of nonsense, even ten dozen reams of it, and that's an honourable thing in its own way; well, but we can't even talk nonsense with our own brain, and i shall love you for it. to talk nonsense in one's own way is almost better than to talk a truth that's someone else's; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot! the truth won't go away, but life can be knocked on the head and done in.

that's why they have such distaste for the living process of life: they don't want the living soul! the living soul demands to live, the living soul isn't obedient to the laws of mechanics, the living soul is suspicious, the living soul is reactionary!

no, life has been given me once and it won't come along again: i don't want to wait for "universal happiness". i want to live my own life, too, otherwise i'd do better not to live at all.

• 91 — jack kerouac on the road
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

what difference does it make after all? - anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? all in the mind.

• 92 — charles baudelaire the flowers of evil
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

beauty.

i am lovely, o mortals, like a dream of stone, and my bosom, where each one gets bruised in turn, to inspire the love of a poet is prone, like matter eternally silent and stern.

with pearly robes that wave within the wind, even when she walks, she seems to dance, like swaying serpents round those wands entwined wich falkirs ware in rhythmic elegance.

o mystic metamorphosis of all my senses blent in one! her voice a beateous perfume is, her breath makes music, chaste and wan.

where all that one loves is so worthy, and lovingly yields, and our hearts float in the purest of ecstasy, how distant you seem to be, perfumed elysian fields.

i know that there are eyes, most melancholy ones, wherein no precious secret deeply hidden lies.

• 92 — patricia highsmith the talented mr. ripley
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆
• 93 — stephenie meyer breaking dawn
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

fire and ice, somehow existing together without destroying each other. more proof that i belonged to him.

"i guess my brain will never work right. at least i'm pretty."

• 94 — joan didion the year of magical thinking
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better of for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

• 95 — j. r. r. tolkien o hobbit
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

"você é uma ótima pessoa, sr. bolseiro, e gosto muito de você; mas, afinal de contas, você é apenas uma pessoazinha neste mundo enorme!" "ainda bem!"

• 96 — patti smith just kids
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

he wasn't certain whether he was a good or a bad person. whether he was altruistic. whether he was demonic. but he was certain of one thing. he was an artist. and for that he would never apologize.

"you're looking for shortcuts," i said. "why should i take the long road?" he answered.

"patti! you don't really like them; you're just being difficult. you just want them because they're french."

i was not moved by the movie; perhaps it wasn't french enough for me.

• 97 — dolly alderton everything i know about love
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

as it turns out, i discovered i had absolutely nothing in common with most boys and next to no interest in them unless i wanted to kiss them.

i slowly began to realize that it's best for those first dates to happen in real life rather than in written form, otherwise the disparity between who you imagine the other person to be and who they actually are grows wider and wider. many times, i would invent a person in my head and create our chemistry as if writing a screenplay and by the time we'd meet again in real life, i'd be crushingly let down. it was as if, when things didn't go as i imagined, i'd assumed he would have been given a copy of the script i'd written and i'd feel frustated that his agent obviously forgot to courier it to him to memorize.

i thought that, to be a writer, i had to be a collector of experiences. and i thought every experience worth having, every person worth meeting, only existed after dark.

reasons not to have a boyfriend - everyone annoys you other than you.

'yeah, but not that kind of sense of self, i said. 'not, like, how i will vote in the eu referendum or what my favourite way of serving potato is. she means i break myself off into different bits to give to different people, rather than being whole. i'm so restless and unsettled. i don't know hot to be without all the things i use to prop me up.'

'today will be one of the hardest days,' i said, 'and then it will be finished. at midnight, it's done. and you'll never have to go through it again.'

if you feel exhausted by people, it's because you're willingly playing the martyr to make them like you. it's your problem, not theirs.

• 98 — britney spears the woman in me
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

nobody in my town seemed to be doing stuff like that. but i knew what i wanted to see in the world, and i tried to make it so. artists make things and play characters because they want to escape into faraway worlds, and escape was exactly what i needed. i wanted to live inside my dreams, my wonderful fictitious world, and never think about reality if i could help it. singing bridged reality and fantasy, the world i was living in and the world that i desperately wanted to inhabit.

i wanted to hide, but i also wanted to be seen. both things could be true.

what do we have except our connections to one another? and what stronger bond is there than music?