Nancy > Nancy's Quotes

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“You don't take a photograph, you make it.”
― Ansel Adams

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”
― Hazel Rochman

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker

“This is the magic of the word in print: not that it answers questions but that it composes an ongoing score for life, a mute chorus of voices as alive and evolving as light.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“Wisdom begins in listening; listening begins in silence; silence is rooted in solitude.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don’t say.”
― Virginia Woolf

“People go, you know. It’s only you that remains. That’s the way it will be. That’s certain at least. It takes years to learn to be still.”
― Joy Williams, State of Grace

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you’re fifteen years old”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth—or perhaps untruth, some flash of light—is just occurring. It is clamorous with the moment’s happiness or pain. To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship. What we’ve been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago.”
― Suzanne Marrs, What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell

“THE HOUSE SEEMED UTTERLY deserted. Compared to the Christmases of his childhood there was something unforgiving about Leyville now. Montignac’s aunt, Ann, had always made the house seem incredibly festive, with an enormous Christmas tree in the downstairs hallway that stretched halfway up the house, past the staircase, in the direction of the first-floor bedrooms. The mantelpieces were always covered with holly and cards; stockings were pinned by the fireplace. Wrapping paper and presents were to be found in every nook and cranny. There was nothing like that now, just the stark emptiness of the rest of the year and the echoing silence of generations that had passed through the house and died.”
― John Boyne, Next of Kin