Jenn > Jenn's Quotes

“The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.”
― Amy Hempel

“As I passed through the gates, the blistered hands of nostalgia gave my heart a good squeeze and I realized you miss shit times as well as good times, because at the end of the day what you're really missing is just time itself. ”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. . . . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“In all things we become acclimated; this is our strength in wartime, and also our weakness. What is a principle, if it alter with circumstance?
But what is a man, if he cannot change to meet changed times?
And if he can change to meet changed times, is he a man, or several in succession?”
― M.T. Anderson, The Kingdom on the Waves

“I groaned. Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he's so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Altruism is the kind of pie best eaten with a lot of gravy and little inspection of the kind of kidney it's stuffed with.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Kingdom on the Waves

“You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.”
― Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom

“The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”
― John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism

“His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come- the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“It's never the changes we want that change everything.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.”
― Susan Orlean, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People

“There is nothing sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

“People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn't your fault.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“Think of life as a story. Each one must come to an end, for it to have form and meaning. What gives life to the stories are the bodies at the end of them.”
― Rajesh Parameswaran, I Am an Executioner: Love Stories