All the quotes I collected in 2022.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Look, son," Cyrus said earnestly, "nearly all men are afraid, and they don't even know what causes their fear—shadows, perplexities, dangers without names or numbers, fear of a faceless death. But if you can bring yourself to face not shadows but real death, described and recognizable, by bullet or saber, arrow or lance, then you need never be afraid again, at least not the same way you were before.
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just--his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back.
Can't you feel the cold at night of a lone child? What warm is there, what bird song, what possible morning can be good?
"I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb."
This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe.
There's more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.'
You don't believe I loved you. And the men who come to you here with their ugliness, the men in the pictures-_you don't believe those men could have goodness and beauty in them. You see only one side, and you think- more than that, you're sure--that's all there is."
"Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time."
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace.
For it seemed vain and arrogant in the extreme to try to better that anonymous work of creation; the labours of those vanished hands. Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes.
And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being, she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her.
For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all-worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him.
Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
When I step into the river for the second time, neither I nor the river are the same.
Life is both sad and solemn. We are let into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other—and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.
To see everything from the perspective of eternity.
"Tell me what you do and I'll tell you who you are
Emma by Jane Austen
I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be more.
The Shadow of What Was by James Islington
You can put your trust in something that's obvious, that's measurable or predictable—but that's not faith. Nor is believing in something that gives you no pause for doubt, no reason or desire to question. Faith is something more than that. By definition, it cannot have proof as its foundation.
The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang
But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.
How did you explain to a child the idea of gravity, until they knew what it meant to fall?
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Everyone I loved is dead now. There's no one left to protect. No one left to lie for but me.
You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until someone stands behind you and says, "It's OK, you can fall down now. I'll catch you"
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I send you this letter on a falling star. Re-entry will score and test it but will not melt it away. I write in fire across the sky, a plummet to match your rise.
Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?
This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill
The best story is one that reveals a truth, like something you see and understand in a dream but forget as soon as you wake up.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
"The last few hours were certainly very painful,” replied Anne; "but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering, which was by no means the case at Lyme.
Your countenance perfectly informs me that you were in company last night with the person whom you think the most agreeable in the world, the person who interests you at this present time more than all the rest of the world put together.
I have been doubting and considering as to what I ought to tell you. There were many things to be taken into the account. One hates to be officious, to be giving bad impressions, making mischief. Even the smooth surface of a family union seems worth preserving, though there may be nothing durable beneath.
I am not one of those who neglect the reigning power to bow to the rising sun.
There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other's character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting.
He never even believed himself to see her equal. Thus much, indeed, he was obliged to acknowledge: that he had been constant unconsciously, may unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them.
The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien
But when the great fall, the less must lead.
But the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser trees, and to the meads in the sunshine beyond the feet of the forests; and they saw the sloe in the thicket, and the wild apple and the cherry blossoming in spring, and the green herbs in the waterlands in summer, and the seedling grasses in the autumn fields. They did not desire to speak with these things; but they wished them to hear and obey what was said to them.
He laughed if the sun came out from behind a cloud, he laughed if they came upon a stream or spring: then he stooped and splashed his feet and head with water; he laughed sometimes at some sound or whisper in the trees. Whenever he saw a rowan-tree he halted a while with his arms stretched out, and sang, and swayed as he sang.
There, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way; and sometimes they are withered untimely.
Now we feel the peril that we were warned of. Have we ridden forth to victory, only to stand at last amazed by an old liar with honey on his forked tongue? So would the trapped wolf speak to the hounds, if he could. What aid can he give to you, forsooth? All he desires is to escape from his plight. But will you parley with this dealer in treachery and murder?
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring. What's that all about. For me, I might have the leisure to be bored, but not to grow tired of something. Most people can't distinguish between the two.
You're afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination. But you can't suppress dreams.
The strength I'm looking for isn't the kind where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that outside power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things–unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.
War grows within war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being.
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads–at least that's where I imagine it–there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live for ever in your own private library.
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there–to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.
Love’s Work by Gillian Rose
Of there being someone who loves and desires you, and he glories in his love and desire, and you glory in his ever-strange being, which comes up against you, and disappears, again and again, surprising you with difficulties and with bounty. To lose this is the greatest loss, a loss for which there is no consolation.
I must continue to write for the same reason I am always compelled to write, in sickness and in health: for, otherwise, I die deadly, but this way, by this work, I may die forward into the intensified agony of living.
Finding Freedom by Jarvis Jay Masters
"You see, young'un, there are some lessons to this. First, not everybody who shits on you is your enemy. Second, not everybody who takes shit off you is your friend. And finally, young'un," Satchmo paused and stared across the yard, "if you ever get warm and comfortable out there, even if it's in a pile of shit, you keep your mouth shut!”
Understanding impermanence, that things are here today and gone tomorrow, really helps. No matter how bad something is, you can remind yourself, "Damn, this won't last long.” Then when it doesn't last, you can laugh and say, "I knew it!” What goes around, comes around, and what comes around doesn't last. Everybody gets their turn: the police jump on you, the light goes out, there's a roach in your soup.
The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker
Violence is a part of America, and more than that, it is a part of our species. It is around us, and it is in us. As the most powerful people in history, we have climbed to the top ot the world tood chain, so to speak. Facing not one single enemy or predator who poses to us any danger of consequence, we've found the only prey left: ourselves.
Studying and interviewing those who use violence to reach their goals, I long ago learned that I must find in them some part of myself, and, more disturbingly at times, find in myself some part of them.
It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different men and women live in different worlds. I don't remember where I first heard this simple description of one dramatic contrast between the genders, but it is strikingly accurate: At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.
That someone would intrude on our peace of mind, that they would speak words so difficult to take back, that they would exploit our fear, that they would care so little about us, that they would raise the stakes so high, that they would stoop so low all of this alarms us, and by design.
Colour by Victoria Finlay
They are looking for country. They are looking for the crock of earth at the beginning of the Rainbow Serpent. And yet they don't have to look so carefully any more to see how it glitters.
It is the secret of knowing yourself and your materials so well that you can wrap your lite's experiences into the very body of an instrument, just as a true musician puts his or her lite experiences into the playing of it, as I had seen at the hospice. And when both elements are right, then together maker and musician you can persuade your violin to sing and cry and dance the orange.
Imagine you are an emperor, dusted with gold, surrounded by silks, held high on palanquins, ted the most exquisite foods with jade chopsticks. Everything precious. Would you not then yearn for something earthy and real? When you can have almost anything, it is human nature to want what you are in danger of losing.
Fantasy, depression and God are all, like blue, in the more mysterious reaches of our consciousness.
Buddhism is a faith that understands impermanence. When else in their long history could these two vast and armless trunks of stone standing in the desert have reminded so many people in so many countries that nothing lasts for ever?
It is the same story around the world: when we name the most valuable we tend to seek out the exotic; we rarely choose the thing—however unusual—that can be picked up by donkey-boys a day's journey away.
Perhaps it was those tiny imperfections—meaning that the warm sunlight scattered unevenly as it passed from one side of the glass to another—which made me feel on a day after rain in Chartres that something holy was there too.
How many shades can a walnut be? What is the colour of a healthy liver? How can you describe the ideal organic strawberry to a buyer on the other side of the world? What shade do you want your car to be? Or your hair? Or the sapphire in your engagement ring? How can you measure the colour of pies? Writing and researching this book have shown me how hard it is to describe colour—to explain the gleam of insect blood or the natural luminescence of a piece of precious Chinese green-ware or the ruby-like resonance of a glass of saffron tea.
You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
The queen is supposed to be the best among us; the smartest, the most beautiful, the worthiest. But the people who win are rarely the people who deserve it. Like with any monarchy, they're just the closest to the top. You don't earn queen; you inherit it.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
And yet--when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.
And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
Giovanni liked to believe that he was hard-headed and that I was not and that he was teaching me the stony facts of life. It was very important for him to feel this: it was because he knew, unwillingly, at the very bottom of his heart, that I helplessly, at the very bottom of mine, resisted him with all my strength.
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
I liked watching the balance go up. The richer I got, the harder it would be for anyone to force me to do anything.
I'd felt different away from the cockroaches, but I saw now we had plenty in common—insects, climbers, cold inside. We thrived in hostile settings. There were places we did better, but nowhere could kill us. I hated them not because they were contaminants, but because they weren't. There were no pathogens they could spread that I didn't carry myself. Living uphill, away from them, I'd forgotten that. I'd thought my blood was hot.
I started persuading myself that my behaviour was different, then realised I loved the idea that we were calmly exploiting each other and would both go to hell when we died. If he went first, I'd get a bigger advance on my memoir.
Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa
But it wasn't just a question of what to do, he wanted nothing strongly enough to move him to action. He went through the days leadenly, moving only his eyes to peer out at the world.
If all you ever see is reality, you just want to die. The only way to get over barriers, she said, is to live in the spirit of already being over them.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.
Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and—no matter how much we despised ourselves for it—unable quite to let each other go.
And what made these heart-to-hearts possible–you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honour confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
To stay in a convenience store, you have to become a store worker. That's simple enough, you just wear a uniform and do as the manual says. And before you say anything, it was the same in Stone Age society, too. As long as you wear the skin of what's considered an ordinary person and follow the manual, you won't be driven out of the village or treated as a burden.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Here there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.
But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.
In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of humankind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance.
Not seldom, she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or - but this more rarely happened - she would be convulsed with a rage of grief and sob out her love for her mother in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.
But, as he pro-ceded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce though still calm necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. Alas, for his own soul, if these were what he sought!
The links that united her to the rest of humankind - links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material - had all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.
She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble; as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow creature.
You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart. Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death; and still he knows you not.
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might exterminate us?
And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede - a stampede gigantic and terrible - without order and without a goal, six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind.
It is disagreeable for me to recall and write these things, but I set them down that my story may lack nothing. Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental things, will have a wider charity.
I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow, and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.
The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their tortuous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was consideration - and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap - not designed, but deep - to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble - they were of a gentleness so extraordinary.
Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.
“No, no - there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see - what I don't fear!”
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there's air available.
But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones.
You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
But it so pleased Heaven that, as a trial of her faith, she was married to one of the wicked; a man all over spotted with the leprosy of sin. As well might they have conjoined fire and water together, in hopes that they would consort and amalgamate, as purity and corruption. She fled from his embraces the first night after their marriage, and from that time forth his iniquities so galled her upright heart that she quitted his society altogether, keeping her own apartments in the same house with him.
Hath he not builded his stories in the heavens, and laid the foundations thereof in the earth, and how can a being like thee judge between good and evil, that are both subjected to the workings of his hand; or of the opposing principles in the son of man, correcting, modifying, and refining one another?
How dreadful the thought, that I have been going daily in company and fellowship with one whose name is written on the red-letter side of the book of life; whose body and soul have been, from all eternity, consigned over to everlasting destruction, and to whom the blood of the atonement can never, never reach!
That time will now soon arrive, sooner than anyone can devise who knows not the tumult of my thoughts and the labour of my spirit; and when it hath come and passed over, when my flesh and my bones are decayed, and my soul has passed to its everlasting home, then shall the sons of men ponder on the events of my life; wonder and tremble, and tremble and wonder how such things should be.
I desired to sleep; but it was for a deeper and longer sleep than that in which the senses were nightly steeped. I longed to be at rest and quiet, and close my eyes on the past and the future alike, as far as this frail life was concerned.
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
It is possible that her behaviour may arise only from Vanity, or a wish of gaining the admiration of a Man whom she must imagine to be particularly prejudiced against her; but it is more likely that she should aim at something farther. She is poor, and may naturally seek an alliance which may be advantageous to herself.
If you can give me your assurance of having no design beyond enjoying the conversation of a clever woman for a short period, and of yeilding admiration only to her Beauty and Abilities without being blinded by them to her faults, you will restore me to happiness; but if you cannot do this, explain to me at least what has occasioned so great an alteration in your opinion of her.
She shall find that she has poured forth her tender Tale of Love in vain, and exposed herself forever to the contempt of the whole world, and the severest Resentment of her injured Mother.
I shall ever despise the Man who can be gratified by the Passion, which he never wished to inspire, nor solicited the avowal of. I shall always detest them both. He can have no true regard for me, or he would not have listened to her; And she, with her little rebellious heart and indelicate feelings to throw herself into the protection of a young Man with whom she had scarcely ever exchanged two words before.
You know how I have loved you, you can intimately judge of my present feelings; but I am not so weak as to find indulgence in describing them to a woman who will glory in having excited their anguish, but whose affection they have never been able to gain.
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