Eliza T > Eliza's Quotes

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Words never mean what we want them to mean.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Your heart is my piñata.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“What we don't understand we can make mean anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction

“Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“No matter how long I live, I shall live longer than you will love me”
― Alexandre Dumas fils, Camille

“Everything was believed except the truth.”
― Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias

“Mother says as th' two worst things as can happen to a child is never have his own way-- or always to have it. She doesn't know which is th' worst.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss