Ashley Hoover > Ashley's Quotes

“Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”
― Flaubert

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.”
― Dave Eggers, How the Water Feels to the Fishes

“I found it paralyzingly difficult to make even the simplest decisions. So much hung in the balance, so many complicated parameters needed to be taken into consideration, yet always there was too little information, no way to know what outcomes could result. Life was a terrifying, invisible web of consequences. What mayhem might I unknowingly wreak by saying yes when I could have said no, by going east instead of west?”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“What is the past but what we choose to remember?”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Do you see now why I believe in miracles? I used to imagine time folding over, the shades of our future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of us on the shoulder and whisper: Look, there, look! That man, that woman: they're for you; that's your life, your future, fidgeting in the line, dripping on the carpet, shuffling in that doorway. Don't miss it.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.”
― Geoff Dyer

“I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“arrears, n.

My faithfulness was as unthinking as your lapse. Of all the things I though would go wrong, I never thought it would be that.
"It was a mistake," you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this
question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have
come up with many different answers. According to the Western
philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank
Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The
stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the
hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School
parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit
“Love Is Like Oxygen”—you get too much, you get too high,
not enough and you’re gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love
bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times
all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to
show them.
But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

“That's when I wanted to cut. I cut to quiet the cacophony. I cut to end this abstracted agony, to reel my selves back to one present and physical whole, whose blood was the proof of her tangibility.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair

I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see

For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green

I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know

But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”
― Lillian Hellman, Pentimento

“Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you. ... You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entirely, an that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time -four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone- it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but- a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn’t think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me. And yet it was the main reason I’d gone in those houses with Tom: I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she’d been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“but the first rule of restorations, as he'd taught me earlier on, was that you never did what you couldn't reverse.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also—if this isn't too grand a word—our tragedy.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending