Kelsey Clarke > Kelsey's Quotes

“We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's taste exceeds one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Happy. Not giddy or overjoyed, but that low, steady level of happiness that, in the best periods of life, rides underneath everything else, a buffer between you and the world you are walking over.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“You know that feeling, when you're watching someone sleep and you feel overwhelmed with joy that they exist?”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“A pushover is a bad thing to be, but an opinionated pushover is a worse thing to be. A pushover is nice and goes along with it, whatever it is. An opinionated pushover acts nice and goes along with it, but while quietly brooding and resentful. I am an opinionated pushover.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“What did you bring your host family?'
'Chocolate.'
'Chocolate.' She sighed.
'I'm afraid I'll accidentally eat it all before I get there,' I said, following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn't resist chocolate.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn't just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I’m always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there’s some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans

“I felt luxuriously involved in an unsolvable mystery, my favorite way to feel.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“You know, when you come to think about it, it's a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I've often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death. Sometimes one hardly even notices it's happened, that moment, until some careless remark arouses one's suspicions. I have found that what usually brings this lethargy on is if the woman displays some special kindness. Like making dinner.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A. It’s freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness, it’s freedom to look out the window and think of London and little violets and Paris and cobblestones. It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“She figured that any day now she was going to start feeling the simple composure of normalcy that Jane Austen's heroines always sought to maintain, the state described in those days as "countenance," and later as "being cool.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“Max's laugh was like a dragnet; it picked up every living laugh within the vicinity and shined a light on it, intensified it, pitched it higher. It was a dare--he dared you not to laugh with him. He dared you to despair. He dared you to insist that there was no dawn, that all there was was darkness, that there was no silver lining, that the heart didn't grow fonder by absence. He dared you to believe you were going to die--when you at that moment knew, just as he did, that you were immortal, you were among the gods.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have "everything," not success-type "everything." I mean, not when the "everything" isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there at least a precedent). There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version fo the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They'll only give you "everything" if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I wonder if I'll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“God, what a night. I was so glad you were home, standing up in all that wind while everyone else was blowing across the streets like tumbleweeds. I wonder if you wish you hadn't been there, with the future looming up in such utter chaos before us. And meanwhile, the night was old and you were beautiful.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.