Laura > Laura's Quotes

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”
― Frank Herbert, Children Of Dune

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I'm not all that smart. It takes me a while to understand things. But if I do have the time, I will come to understand you – better than anyone else in the world ever can.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood