Kylie > Kylie's Quotes

“She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“When I pick up a book and read it, I want to be transported. I want to be taken someplace that I didn't quite know existed, so that by the time I close the book, and return to my own reality, my world is expanded and has become a little larger and a little more complicated.”
― Anthony Marra

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“His temperament was deeply nostalgic, not for for his own past, but for past ages; he was cynical of the present, fearful of the future and profoundly regretful of the world's decay.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“Money is a burden, a burden most keenly felt by the poor.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“A man ought never to trust another man’s evaluation of a third man’s disposition.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Sister. She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities. She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway. She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark. She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. Some days, she's the reason you wish you were an only child.”
― Barbara Alpert

“Of two sisters
one is always the watcher,
one the dancer.”
― Louise Glück, Descending Figure

“You can kid the world, but not your sister.”
― Charlotte Gray

“I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray