Lara Maynard > Lara's Quotes

“Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.”
― Mark Slouka, God's Fool

“Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?”
― Mark Slouka, God's Fool

“Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.”
― Mark Slouka, Brewster

“My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.”
― Mark Slouka

“If I needed your condescension, I'd ask for it.”
― Mark Slouka, The Visible World

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Anyone getting starry-eyed about owning a bookstore should ask herself a few questions: Can you lift a box weighing fifty pounds? Do you know what cat pee on paper smells like and can you get it out? Will you exude patience while solving puzzles that start "I'm looking for a book..." and peter out somewhere between "it has 'The' in the title" and "It has a red cover and the author was a soldier whose last name started with S. Or was it Z?”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“Another lesson for bookshop owners: "Learn how to listen yet let it pass through you." Thanks to some therapist friends, I have finally acquired that tough skill. But it wasn't part of our anticipated job description.”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“I love her and hate her at the same time. I even love the parts of her that I hate, her vitality and her colour, her disruption and disorder, her humour and her despair, her conceit and her narcissism, her everything that isn't me.”
― Poppy Adams, The Sister

“I am a fallen woman, but I assure you: I did not fall. I was pushed.”
― Michel Faber

“Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“No matter how hopeless you feel, strive to find the one thing that makes you feel alive and pull yourself to the light at the end of the tunnel. There is hope. Trust me.”
― Tammy-Louise Wilkins

“His books distracted him for a while. They were like the aspirins you take when you've got a headache. They kill the pain for two hours and then it comes back.”
― Barbara Vine, Gallowglass

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.”
― Djuna Barnes

“I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“All good things in life are fragile and easily lost”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed