Jessica > Jessica's Quotes

“Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

“And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person...that solitude was what one relished the most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

“There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding. ”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

“Paris is always a good idea.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought clam and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother's white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines.”
― Henry James, The American

“He was "distinguished" to the tips of his polished nails, and there was not a movement of his fine perpendicular person that was not noble and majestic. Newman had never yet been confronted with such an incarnation of the art of taking oneself seriously; he felt a sort of impulse to step backward, as you do to get a view of a great facade.”
― Henry James, The American

“Happiness is a habit—cultivate it.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“You live it forward, but understand it backward.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“I spent as much time as I could with Ghosh. I wanted every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is THIS moment!" Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize.

Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

“You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress .”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry