Robert Pearson > Robert's Quotes

“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?”
― Roberto Bolaño

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

“Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.”
― Nadia Boulanger

“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.”
― David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
― Roberto Bolano, 2666

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient”
― Marilynne Robinson

“Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.”
― Paul Bowles

“Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
― Raymond Carver

“Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.”
― Raymond Carver

“Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”
― Raymond Carver, The Bridle