Maris > Maris's Quotes

“Believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God almost seems rational.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“I wondered if my life was going to be one immersion after another, a great march of shallow, unpopular popular culture infatuations that don't really last and don't really mean anything. Sometimes I even think maybe my deepest obsessions are just random manifestations of my loneliness or isolation. Maybe I infuse ordinary experience with a kind of sacred aura to mitigate the spiritual vapidity of my life....no, it is beautiful to be enraptured. To be enthralled by something, anything. And it isn't random. It speaks to you for a reason. If you wanted to, you could look at it that way, and you might find you aren't wasting your life. You are discovering things about yourself and the world, even if it is just what you find beautiful, right now, this second.”
― Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“All the world's a stage we're going through.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.”
― John Steinbeck

“Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?”
― Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow

“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”
― kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

“Everything ends, and Everything matters.

Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.”
― Harvey Pekar

“People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.”
― Francine Prose, Goldengrove

“Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.”
― Annie Dillard, The Maytrees

“How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to...”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“Never fall in love with an idea. They’re whores: if the one you’re with isn’t doing the job there’s always, always, always another.”
― Chip Kidd, The Cheese Monkeys

“Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“It's amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“She developed a kind of disdain for her only sibling usually reserved for despotic political regimes and perpetrators of genocide.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass - seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie?”
― Lorrie Moore

“Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it. She wanted her next lover to be a broom.”
― Richard Brautigan, Sombrero Fallout

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest