Jane > Jane's Quotes

“Dusk, suggesting the almost imperceptible posession of giant trees, settled with a purple haze about the cane. I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had a vision.”
― Jean Toomer

“Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“From things about to disappear I turn away in time. To watch them out of sight, no, I can't do it.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Looking at the horizon again, I saw a lone figure coming toward me, but I wasn't frightened because I was sure it was my mother. As I got closer to the figure, I could see that it wasn't my mother, but still I wasn't frightened because I could see that it was a woman.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River

“She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“...we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.

I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, not she that She for me.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“This was mere unfounded prejudice--that seems obvious to me--because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of "immigrant" could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desert-like cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Collected Stories

“Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Collected Stories

“A long time ago, I read in a book that a woman's homeland is wherever she fell in love.”
― Antonio Lobo Antunes, The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings

“Physically it's kind of lassitude, the apathy and tiredness that precedes the flu or some other illness, or death. My legs ache and feel heavy, my skin has become more sensitive to cold and to heat, to the hardness or rigidity of things. Nothing interests me, I feel uncomfortable being still but would feel even more uncomfortable if I moved. I don't know whether speaking is painful or just boring. I sit here, staring straight ahead, with no desires, no needs, hollow. I'm not even sad. I feel only passivity and indifference.”
― Antonio Lobo Antunes, The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings

“To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the guilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or climbing into their favelas, were all natural scene designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theater is as vivid, voluble, and cheap.”
― Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays

“I love three things, I then say. I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth.

And which do you love best?

The dream.”
― Knut Hamsun, Pan

“My grandfather said white people can't exist without speaking. He said they're all just imitations of each other, so it's like they have to speak to distinguish themselves.”
― Jessica Anthony, The Convalescent

“The world has been easy on this man. He overflows with inner resources.”
― Jessica Anthony, The Convalescent

“There was a rock in front of my hut, a tall, gray rock. By its looks it seemed to be well-disposed toward me...”
― Knut Hamsun, Pan

“It was the seahorses themselves that she wanted to see as soon as she took her eyes away, and that she wanted to see even when she was looking at them.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?”
― Carson McCullers, A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud