BookIT1981 > BookIT1981's Quotes

“After meeting someone by chance and throwing off a few sparks, can there be any substance to the feeling that you've known each other your whole lives? After those first few hours of conversation, can you really be sure that your connection is so uncommon that it belongs outside the bounds of time and convention?”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.

Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”
― Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory

“Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.”
― Khalil Gibran

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“What the war did to dreamers.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Who knew love could kill you?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn't care and went on anyway.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“If you're always aiming for perfection, you won't make anything at all.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit." Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. "Can you believe our luck?" Max said. "We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit!"
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met - he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had hey just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Sure the priests ran the country back then and they hated women. Oh my God, they hated women and anything that had to do with women and anything to do with women’s bodies or ideas or desires, and any chance that they had to humiliate a woman or bring her down, they would take full advantage of it.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“The notion that he had a life outside our life, outside our friendship, was deeply hurtful to me.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“And what did I do, only slip my hand inside his own and say that maybe he should hold my hand instead for a while, and I can see the look on his face even to this day. The shock and the desire. Oh, I loved the power I had over him! The power I could sense in myself! You won't understand this but it's something that every girl realizes at some point in her life, usually when she's around fifteen or sixteen. Maybe it's even younger now. That she has more power than every man in the room combined, because men are weak and governed by their desires and their desperate need for women but women are strong. I've always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they'd rule the world. But they don't. I don't know why. And for all their weakness and stupidity, men are smart enough to know that being in charge counts for a lot. They have that over us at least.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies