"i mock this skull. i look at it and say 'you've got the wrong fellow. you may not believe in life, but i don't believe in death. move on!' the skull snickers & moves ever closer, but that doesn't surprise me. the reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. but life leaps over oblivion lightly; losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but a passing shadow of a cloud." - life of pi (6)
"i have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful." - life of pi (7)
"to look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away." - life of pi (212)
"i had in my life looked at a number of beautiful starry nights, where with just two colors and the simplest of styles nature draws the grandest of pictures." - life of pi (244)
"what a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell...it's important in life to conclude things properly. only then can you let go. otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse." - life of pi (360)
"love is hard to believe, ask any lover. life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. god is hard to believe, ask any believer." - life of pi (375)
"reason is excellent for getting food, clothing, shelter. reason is the very best tool kit. nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. but be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater." - life of pi (375)
"most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons." - lolita (73)
"only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries." - lolita (94)
"a change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely." - lolita (239)
"suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection." - lolita (263)
"jealousy which survives every other passion of mankind." - mrs. dalloway (78)
"and so we want faster cars, faster boats, faster jets, faster computers - anything more powerful than everything else. and we continue to want them even after we learn that there's nowhere worth going except where we left and that the faster we go, the further away from there we get." - girls (183)
"it is such a secret place, the land of tears." - antoine de saint-exupery
"i don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. my own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. i like the heroes or heroines of books i read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. loneliness makes you consider other people's lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. the interior of the fold is, of course, the ultimate loneliness, and i like it there. but there are times when the wish for others' voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain." - fermata (59)
"but that is the strange thing about what you are expected to do in life - you are supposed to forget that there are hundreds of cities, each one of them full of women, and that it is most unlikely that you have found the perfect one for you. you are just supposed to pick the best one out of the ones you know and can attract, and in fact you do this happily - you feel that the love you direct toward the one you do choose is not arbitrarily bestowed." - fermata (6)
"And here's my theory: Neither the grandmother nor any other woman in that room was placing her marriage at the center of her emotional biography in any way that was remotely familiar"
"There is only one God by which we mean the Oneness that subsumes all categories. We might call this Oneness the ocean of reality and everything that swims in it [which abides by] the first teaching of the Ten Commandments.
"All our senses feed the brain, and if it diets mainly on cruelty and suffering, how can it remain healthy? Change that diet on purpose, train mentally to refocus the mind, and one nourishes the brain." - Rabbi Shapira (in "the zookeepers wife")
"then the credits would roll and the audience would sniffle and smile and head out of the theater blinking into the sunlight and wondering why their lives sucked so bad." - drink play fuck (andrew gottlieb) (175)
"the man she had loved was a mere shell. and she felt something more, unwelcome: a feeling of pity, fatal to passion." - the piano teacher (308)
nov 30 2010 +