Bebe Cassidy > Bebe's Quotes

“I can, from the distance of years now, still think I’m hearing the voices of two young men singing these words in Neapolitan toward daybreak, neither realizing, as they held each other and kissed again and again on the dark lanes of old Rome, that this was the last night they would ever make love again. “Tomorrow let’s go to San Clemente,” I said. “Tomorrow is today,” he replied.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn’t meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn’t visit their new baby, three million furious you didn’t see their new show, one million furious you didn’t call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you. It is completely reasonable to call none of them.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“That's money, the substance that makes the world real. There's something so corrupt and sexy about it”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Is it a good life, Daddy?” Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Creating special language to influence people’s behavior and beliefs is so effective in part simply because speech is the first thing we’re willing to change about ourselves . . . and also the last thing we let go.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“I’d never slept with a woman before, though I’d spent most of my teens and college years obsessed with one or another. They’d all had boyfriends, or girlfriends, or else they were just patently not someone who would ever fancy me. When I told Edith this, she asked if I thought I’d gone for unavailable people because I knew I’d never have to face the reality that being with them would not solve all my problems. I told her she had no business saying something that perceptive.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“When you think about all the infinitely many galaxies and combinations of DNA, and against all those odds you meet this person - it's a miracle...'
'Right,' I said. I couldn't imagine viewing Bill's presence on Earth as any kind of a miracle, but wasn't that itself the miracle - that love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up by how quantifiably lovable they are?”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special - which is fair, who doesn’t - but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times