CarolineB > CarolineB's Quotes

“All I ever wanted was to know what to do.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“I'm trying to figure out if I love art enough to be poor.”
― Marina Keegan

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
― Barack Obama

“In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.”
― Conan O'Brien

“All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”
― Conan O'Brien

“I never met a soul in this world as normal as me.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“It's like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Dish said no more, and Augustus decided not to tease him. Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity- they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour. Young Dish, skilled cowhand that he was, might not live to see the whores of Ogallala, and the tender feelings he harbored for Lorena might be the sweetest he would ever have.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“The man turned his blue eyes on July for a moment. 'Why, son, I'm fine,' he said. 'You're the one in trouble. I can see you carry a weight on your heart. You're hurrying along to do something you may not want to do. I see by your badge that you're a lawman. But the crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes. I have often sinned worse than the murderer, and yet I try to live in virtue.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“. . . But experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward. And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you've closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you've done today.”
― Sonia Sodamayor, My Beloved World

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I...”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word and thought, are enemies of truth, if you identify that with what may be had by phenomenological reductions. Sartre was always, as he explains in his autobiography, aware of their being at variance with reality. One remembers the comic account of this antipathy in Iris Murdoch Under the Net, one of the few truly philosophical novels in English; truth would be found only in a silent poem or a silent novel. As soon as it speaks, begins to be a novel, it imposes causality and concordance, development, character, a past which matters and a future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the author rather than that of the characters. They have their choices, but the novel has its end. *
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* There is a remarkable passage in Ortega y Gasset London essay ' History as a System' (in Philosophy and History, ed. Klibansky and Paton, 1936) which very clearly states the issues more notoriously formulated by Sartre. Ortega is discussing man's duty to make himself. 'I invent projects of being and doing in the light of circumstance. This alone I come upon, this alone is given me: circumstance. It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to "ideate" the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself... Among... possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not... To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was...' This 'constitutive instability' is the human property lacking in the novels condemned by Sartre and Murdoch. Ortega differs from Sartre on the use of the past; but when he says that his free man is, willy-nilly, 'a second-hand God,' creating his own entity, he is very close to Sartre, who says that to be is to be like the hero in a novel. In one instance the eidetic image is of God, in the other of the Hero.”
― Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

“Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse; and tick-tock is in any case not much of a plot. We need much larger ones and much more complicated ones if we persist in finding 'what will suffice.' And what happens if the organization is much more complex than tick-tock? Suppose, for instance, that it is a thousand-page novel. Then it obviously will not lie within what is called our 'temporal horizon'; to maintain the experience of organization we shall need many more fictional devices. And although they will essentially be of the same kind as calling the second of those two related sounds tock, they will obviously be more resourceful and elaborate. They have to defeat the tendency of the interval between tick and tock to empty itself; to maintain within that interval following tick a lively expectation of tock, and a sense that however remote tock may be, all that happens happens as if tock were certainly following. All such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning. To put it another way, the interval must be purged of simple chronicity, of the emptiness of tock-tick., humanly uninteresting successiveness. It is required to be a significant season, kairos poised between beginning and end. It has to be, on a scale much greater than that which concerns the psychologists, an instance of what they call 'temporal integration'--our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future, in a common organization. Within this organization that which was conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and future: what was chronos becomes kairos. This is the time of the novelist, a transformation of mere successiveness which has been likened, by writers as different as Forster and Musil, to the experience of love, the erotic consciousness which makes divinely satisfactory sense out of the commonplace person.”
― Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

“The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it. And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience. It can also absorb changing interests, rival apocalypses, such as the Sibylline writings. It is patient of change and of historiographical sophistications. It allows itself to be diffused, blended with other varieties of fiction--tragedy, for example, myths of Empire and of Decadence--and yet it can survive in very naïve forms. Probably the most sophisticated of us is capable at times of naïve reactions to the End.”
― Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

“A sentence which might bear in mind that our great struggle is that of fear, and that if a man has killed compulsively, it is because he was extremely frightened. Above all, a justice which might examine itself, & recognize that all of us, a living quagmire, founded in darkness, & for this reason not a man's evil should be cosigned to another man's evil: so that the latter may not shoot to kill without restraint or censure. A justice which will not forget that we are all dangerous, & that at the hour when the executant of justice kills, he is no longer protecting us or seeking to eliminate a criminal; he is committing his own crime, which he has been harboring for a considerable time. At the hour of killing a criminal- at that very moment, an innocent man is being put to death. No, no, I am not asking for the sublime, nor for the things which gradually become the words which help me to sleep peacefully. Those of us who take refuge in the abstract are a mixture of forgiveness & vague charity. What I want is something much harsher & much more difficult: I want the terrestrial.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest