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Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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“The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame?”

— John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

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He occasionally missed Simone, but every time, right after feeling a desire to see her again, he was always relieved not to have to deal with her. If she could just appear at certain exact moments — when he was horny, or needed someone to talk to — that would have worked out fine, but people were not like that. There were hours built in where you had to hear someone express feelings about something that didn’t seem important, and you nodded and pretended that it was. You had to mask your own ambivalence and pretend to be in love one hundred percent of the time, and he’d rather swim in a lake of hellfire.

Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

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“A system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything — and jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.”

— Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

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Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

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“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller that there is.”

— William S. Burroughs, Last Words

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There is no such thing as a true account of anything. Each sees the world from his own vantage point. Needless to say, a throne is not the best place from which to view anything except the backs of prostrate men.

Gore Vidal, Creation

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“He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.”

— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

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He seemed convinced that children's questions were much more important than those of an adult. He preferred smart questions to smart answers.

Yōko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

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“I shall create whatever happened to me. Only because life cannot be retold. Life is not livable. I shall have to create atop life. And without lying. Create yes, lie no. Creating isn’t imagination, it’s taking the great risk of grasping reality. Understanding is a creation, my only way.”

— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H.

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A large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful — what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives? — and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it...

David Foster Wallace, Oblivion

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“Things go backward. And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it. Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has closed herself to me.”

— Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

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She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

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“The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers

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The word psyche means two things in Greek... Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren’t so different, after all, are they? A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing, and then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens and out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That’s what happens to souls as well... They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes, and bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them, and one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly.

Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

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“She was honest enough to admit that her privacy cloaked a fear: the fear of being found out as a hypocrite.”

— Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

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Peacocks. Oh to live among peacocks. I’d seen them once in person and they defied so many laws of color and gravity that they had to be made geniuses waiting to take over everything.

Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

#literature #quotes #Dave Eggers #You Shall Know Our Velocity! #quote #books #lit