Jasna > Jasna's Quotes

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“When all else fails, philosophize.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Every letter was a love letter.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“She wasn't all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers.
Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius. She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“My goal in life is to become an adjective," Leonard said. "People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“He often heard that wisdom comes with age, and he waited, trusting that this wisdom would bring him what he most wanted; that ability to guide his memories and not fall into the traps that they often set for him.”
― Luis Sepúlveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories

“The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“First of all, I know it’s all people like you. And that’s what’s so scary. Individually you don’t know what you’re doing collectively.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“You’re like part human, part rainbow.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“And worse, you’re not doing anything interesting anymore. You’re not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you’re at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven’t done anything offscreen in months. Have you?”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Openness is all, she thought. Truth was its own reward.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Grief doesn't arrive on schedule, as much as we'd like to.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Grozim se tolikih stvari, pa tako i one bijedne carpe diem formule. Živim negdje izmedju, u nekoj vjeri da postoji smisao života premda ga nisam vidio. Nešto slično kao što neki vjeruju da postoji Bog, premda o tome ne mogu dati nikakav dokaz osim vlastite vjere.”
― Ivica Prtenjača, Brdo

“He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing it for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Beginnings could happen more than once or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcomings and overcome them and so the real business of walking was happening only now.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“We hang on by so little, he thought, and felt the full despair of knowing that.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“We are never very far from those we hate. For this very reason, we shall never be truly close to those we love.”
― Albert Sánchez Piñol, Cold Skin

“To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left. You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow