Jenifer > Jenifer's Quotes

“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“We're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”
― Tennessee Williams

“You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way.”
― Bob Dylan

“When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“It would have been nice to have had unicorns.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.”
― Tom Stoppard

“Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.”
― Umberto Eco, Baudolino

“Pirates could happen to anyone.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“History: the lies of the victors, the self-delusions of the defeated.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”
― William Faulkner

“I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don't quite know why we're here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and write in bandaged uncertainty - are we a voluntary patient? - we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.”
― Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view.
And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone.

When you look up the stage directions, it says, ‘Exit Ariel.”
― Tom Stoppard

“What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?”
― Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending

“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending