Natalie Vie > Natalie's Quotes

“During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:

Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”
― Khalil Gibran

“The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce "Nurse," I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. " You have a lovely pitching arm." You had to go down on them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I'll never forgot you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“Their words were only accidents in the mutual silence.”
― D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

“Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind’s emptiness. A thought is taking shape, then suddenly it notices that there is nothing more to think. Whereupon it crashes to the ground like a figure in a comic strip who suddenly realises that he has been walking on air.”
― Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.”
― John Cheever

“All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.”
― John Cheever

“After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.”
― John Ashbery

“His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72).”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.”
― Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

“Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his first minute, after noon, is night.”
― John Donne, The Complete English Poems