Barbara > Barbara's Quotes

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that describe something that does not make a noise but, if it did make a noise, would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.”
― Pratchett Terry

“It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“That plain, middle-aged face, with a grave penetrating kindness in it, seeming to tell of a human being who had reached a firm, safe strand, but was looking with helpful pity towards the strugglers still tossed by the waves, had an effect on Maggie at this moment which was afterwards remembered by her as if it had been a promise.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand

“Watch where you leave your victims! I stubbed my toe on that.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand

“Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.”
― Amy Bloom, Away

“Sometimes it's the case that when you hear the thing you have most wanted to hear, you cannot take it in. Hope is everyone's mirage and everyone who comes upon that green and grassy spot, the swaying date palms and the bubbling blue pool, is temporarily taken in, even people who have been there before and even when, upon closer inspection, the oasis is nothing but a reef of sand; even with grains of sand blowing lightly across our faces, we find ourselves standing on soft grass of a tenacious, unreasonable green.”
― Amy Bloom

“He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

“I've done lots of jobs. Right now, I'm a hair collector."

"That's good", said Ishvar tentatively. "What do you have to do as a hair-collector?"

"Collect hair."

"And there is money in that?"

"Oh very big business. There is a great demand for hair in foreign countries."

"What do they do with it? Asked Om skeptical."

"Many different things. Mostly they wear it.Sometimes they paint it in different colors-red, yellow, brown, blue. Foreign women enjoy wearing other people's hair. Men also, especially if they are bald.
In foreign countries they fear baldness. They are so rich in foreign countries, they can afford to fear all kinds of silly things.”
― Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

“I've been in love often enough to be completely exhausted by it, and not to know what it means any more. When you look back afterwards, you can always find another way of putting it. You say, "I was obsessed, it was really lust, I was fooling myself," because after you've recovered from being in love, you always decide that that wasn't what it was.”
― Louis de Bernières

“She was a stray after all. A stray not only in its plantation meaning-orphaned, with no one to look after her-but in every other sphere as well. Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“There's a look of mischief in his eyes. 'Smilla. Why is it that such an elegant and petite girl like you has such a rough voice.'
I'm sorry,' I say, 'if I give you the impression that it is only my mouth that's rough. I do my best to be rough all over.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“We are all migrants through time.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“……., and in any case Nadia had taken one look at Saeed’s father and felt him like a father, for he was so gentle, and evoked in her a protective caring, as if for one’s own child, or for a puppy, or for a beautiful memory one knows has already commenced to fade.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed’s past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of a better era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“There was consolation: The people you loved, they were always there with you, she had learned. Sometimes, she could be in front of a train kiosk or the window of a bookstore, and she could feel Noa's small hand when he was a boy, and she would close her eyes and think of his sweet grassy smell and remember that he had always tried his best. At those moments, it was good to be alone to hold on to him.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“because she would not believe that she was no different than her parents, that seeing him as only Korean—good or bad—was the same as seeing him only as a bad Korean. She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Noa stared at her. She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn't himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn't care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn't care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn't possible. It would never be possible with her.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Etsuko had to go back to the restaurant, but she settled on the sofa for a few minutes. When she had been a young mother there used to be only one time in her waking hours where she’d felt a kind of peace, and that was always after her children went to bed for the night. She longed to see her sons as they were back then: their legs chubby and white, their mushroom haircuts misshapen because they could never sit still at the barber. She wished she could take back the times she had scolded her children just because she was tired. There were so many errors. If life allowed revisions, she would let them stay in their bath a little longer, read them one more story before bed, and fix them another plate of shrimp.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“She liked that he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt. Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“The family trees of the poor don't grow to any height.”
― Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry

“Buddy sought out Irene’s eyes with a classic Buddy look: mystified and sorrowful, like a cocker spaniel who’d finally eviscerated his great enemy, only to find everyone angry and taking the side of the couch pillow.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“They became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t-in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble