halfserious > halfserious's Quotes

“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“It hits him again with the strength of a revelation. Rhythm rather than harmony is the organizing principle. Rhythm is what connects everything together.
We all walk to a melody we hear inside our heads, he thinks. But that rhythm beats differently for each of us. Perhaps love, then, he considers, is where an absolute synchrony establishes itself between two people. ”
― Chris Greenhalgh

“I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“I've had countless conversations with or about people who are "sleeping in separate bedrooms", as if sleeping in the same bed is all there is to staying married, but however bad things get, sharing a bed has never been problematic; it's the rest of life that horrifies.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“Life isn't happily ever after... It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves that burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything - because that's what growing older is.”
― Dennis Lehane, Mystic River

“I used to think it bordered on tragedy the way families lose touch, the way people sever ties, putting a pretty place to live above being together. But now I realize that's just how people like it. They don't always want to be together.”
― Paula Daly, Just What Kind of Mother Are You?

“It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“You get married to get an ally against your family.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You

“Sometimes, commitment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who would ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It saddened him, of course, that his sex life and his home life should have to be two distinct realms, but he was old enough now to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something that had to be sought elsewhere.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“L'amour vrai nait dans la souffrance. Il faut s'épurer de toute fausse joie, de tout plaisir mondain, de toute ambition, de toutes les facilités matérielles, pour atteindre a la liberté du désespéré, seul état dans lequel la vérité du délire amoureux puisse encore trouver sa voie jusqu'au fond de l’être.”
― Simon Liberati, Eva

“Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered – pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.”
― Paul Kalanithi

“Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to haunt you in the end.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty