Eric > Eric's Quotes

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“No one is clean. Living makes you dirty.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“There is no suffering if you don’t want anything.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Take for yourself what you can, and don’t be ruled by others; to belong to oneself—the whole savour of life lies in that,”
― Ivan Turgenev, First Love

“Look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity’s pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.”
― Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

“Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

“But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.”
― Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity

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

“Today I feel some uneasiness in recalling how much I suffered, I have no sympathy for myself of that time.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Everything I know, I know because of love.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour”
― Euripides, Medea

“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world...”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire