Brooke > Brooke's Quotes

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I'm a cynical idealist.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
― Joan Didion

“Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
― Edith Wharton

“If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”
― Edith Wharton

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
― Edith Wharton

“I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.”
― Edith Wharton

“Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Don't look at me in that tone of voice.”
― Dorothy Parker

“They sicken of the calm who know the storm.”
― Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun: Poems

“Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Isn't it pretty to think so.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita