Posts tagged lit:
All teenagers have to make an escape attempt from childhood, just to keep face to themselves, but I think most hope to be caught before they’ve gone too far
—Rosamund Luptop - Afterwards
I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.
—Rosamund Lupton (Sister)
Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you’ll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you’ll turn into a fool yourself.
—Victor Pelevin (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf)
when you start envying people their nervous breakdowns, it’s probably time to start examining your own life a bit more closely.
—Jonathan Tropper - Everything Changes
From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.
—Tom Perrotta - Joe College
The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn’t it: they were the unreflective, active present. they were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn’t be, and they retarded nostalgia in their parents. even as they were getting sick and being bullied and becoming addicted to heroin and getting pregnant, they were in the moment, and she wanted to be in it with them. she wanted to worry herself sick about schools and bullying and drugs.
—Nick Hornby - Juliet Naked
worry that trying not to become me, while certainly a worthwhile pursuit in its own right, has prevented you from actually becoming yourself.
—Jonathan Tropper - Everything Changes
the really good liars, the true grandmasters of bullshit, are so damn convincing because they actually believe their own lies.
—Jonathan Tropper - Everything Changes
you never know when it might be the last time you’ll ever make love to someone. If you did, you’d pay more attention.
—Jonathan Tropper - Everything Changes
when someone is deserving of your anger, they’re still deserving of compassion. It’s hard to pull off, believe me—no one knows that more than me. And if you’re only going to pull it off a handful of times in your life, why not for family?
—Jonathan Tropper - Everything Changes
People think it’s reassuring to say “life carries on”; don’t they understand that it’s the fact your life carries on, while the person you love’s does not, that is one of the acute anguishes of grief?
—Rosamund Lupton - Sister (p. 58)
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.
—Jonathan Franzen - How to be Alone
By the early afternoon, the entire civilized world had its eyes fixed on Budapest. The television companies were swarming over the roof tops, and with a large entourage in tow, the Minister of Domestic Affairs appeared on the scene, where he was told that apart from the curious circumstance in question, no curious circumstance had occurred. The damage, too, was slight. When asked to prove his identity, one of the suspects dropped his ID and because of its great weight, which was proportionate to the suspect’s own size, it scraped the side of a Mitsubishi Pajero. Luckily, it wasn’t an Embassy car.
The Hungarian Prime Minister and President Clinton issued a joint directive about the advisability of negotiations and the removal of the homeless citizens in question from the square, but without undue fuss. The former had received the news at Hajdúhadháza while he was boarding his train, the latter in Washington, and their surprise was eclipsed only by their quick and sagacious assessment of the situation, plus their sang froid.
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