Jerry > Jerry's Quotes

“Innocence is a kind of insanity”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.”
― Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

“He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.”
― Joan Didion

“God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go. ”
― George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

“There is no better life than a life spent laboring at love—exerting effort not because we have to, but because we believe that what we are bringing into being is valuable and we want it to exist. Yet because our culture tends to misunderstand the nature of labor and of love, we undervalue both.”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don’t bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Immigrant parents, when they first move to North America, push towards whiteness, towards assimilation, to survive and thrive. Naturally, their children do too for the first half of their lives. This usually tips the other way, but before we're taught anything, we're taught to hide.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I'm writing - an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts.”
― Edmund White, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

“Like many hard-bitten cynics, he cried easily and was always falling into fluttery love with his type, clean-cut Yalies.”
― Edmund White, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

“Americans were so enthusiastic on first meeting; I'd forgotten that enthusiasm didn't mean anything. The cliche among Europeans was that friendships with Americans didn't go anywhere.”
― Edmund White, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

“You know what else I unfair, about Joel? That I loosened the jar lid, so somebody else could open him up.”
― Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin

“Sharing things is how things get started, and not sharing things is how they end.”
― Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin

“Other days when he has come from or doesn't want to go to a shift at work, he is wild, sucking away everything I thought I knew about the way I'm supposed to be in this world. I feel like a star caught in the gravitational pull of a black hole, unraveling, spinning under the control of some unseen force, torn into streams of fire forever spiraling, never to be put together again.”
― Uzodinma Iweala, Speak No Evil

“The Risorgimento hymn returned to his mind and with it the recognition of all that Italy had once been and which, even now, amid the decadence and carelessness, still remained tragically magnificent.”
― Alberto Moravia, Two Friends

“For the working man there is no abyss...that's why he jumps.”
― Alberto Moravia, Two Friends

“...the people--want to live in peace and to be loved for who they are, to fuck and be fucked. It means we are predestined by history to be the cuckolds of humanity...She betrayed us because we did not love her for who she is, without ulterior motives.”
― Alberto Moravia, Two Friends

“It may seem strange, but the idea that Maurizio might also hold his own weapons, or even the same ones, did not occur to me. And yet I should have suspected that Nella and the Party could also be turned against me. But that is how we men are made: we see everything from our own point of view and have great difficulty imagining another perspective.”
― Alberto Moravia, Two Friends

“Two little provincial intellectuals, that was what they were, and that is the dreariest and oddest thing that can exist on earth.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

“Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

“All these were things that at present seemed like a dream, because Fascism was in power and Fascism wanted people to let themselves crumble away.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays