June 2013
12 posts
“They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
“Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can”
—Louisa May Alcott, Rose In Bloom
“Be proud of your pain, for you are stronger than those with none.”
—Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue
“The leaves streamed down, trembling in the sun. They were not green, only a few, scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of green so bright and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, the green rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, blending over the road and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the branches, like a conscious caress.”
—Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
May 2013
17 posts
“My life is a reading list.”
—John Irving
“My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.”
—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
“I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls, I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything.”
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
“Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory. Take the ordinary man in good health. He likes eating and sleeping. He likes the snuff of fresh air and walking at a brisk pace down the Strand. Or in the country there’s a cock crowing on a gate; there’s a foal galloping round a field. Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple of well-being, repeats the same curve of rhythm; covers fresh sand with a chill or ebbs a little slackly without. So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose - so it seems.”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
“So that is the meaning of discipline, I thought, sacrifice… yes, and blindness; he doesn’t see me. He doesn’t even see me. Am I about to strangle him? I do not know. He cannot possibly. I still do not know. See! Discipline is sacrifice. Yes, and blindness. Yes.”
—Ralph Elison, Invisible Man
“I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.”
—Nabokov’s interview, BBC Television [1962]
April 2013
25 posts
“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“You don’t have to think about love; you either feel it or you don’t.”
—Laura Esquivel, Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate)
“Those huge stars have lasted for million of years by taking care never to absorb any of the fiery rays lovers all over the world send up at them night after night. To avoid that, the star generates so much heat inside itself that it shatters the rays into a thousand pieces. Any look it receives is immediately repulsed, reflected back onto the earth, like a trick done with mirrors. That is the reason the stars shine so brightly at night.”
—Laura Esquivel, Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate)
“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”
—Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
“I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.”
—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
“There are no limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
“Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
“When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to university, where it was carefully taken out of him.”
—Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
