Michelle > Michelle's Quotes

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“She lies on the stripped bed, looking up at the pinhole in the roof. The sky is blue. Clouds pass over. Sky, air, clouds, the sun and moon; it's fine. It's the same as it ever was. She stares at the small spot of blue. She sleeps. She dreams. She wakes up feeling a little more and a little less like herself.”
― A. M. Homes

“This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“I admire your capacity for admiring.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers...”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”
― Don DeLillo, Don DeLillo's White Noise

“When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“It's the same sky we've always live under. It's just in a different mood.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“The end never comes when you think it will. It's always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“Sometimes she thought she was mostly a collection of minor talents.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K