Erin > Erin's Quotes

“Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book," and you put one in my hands. I had the world "game," and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life," and then you came along and said, "Oh! You mean this.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“everyone remembers things which never happened, and it’s common knowledge that people often forget things which did. either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. but i have heard people say we are shaped by our childhood, but which one?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“People say the magic has gone out of the moon now that someone’s stood on it. I don’t think so. It would take more than a man’s foot to steal the moon.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“It never ceases to amaze me how assured you priests are of your place in the scheme of things. What you refuse to see is how recent is your hold here, that the land was inhabited long before you and your kind ever arrived, with your crosses and your prayers. You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow, how fast the stream...”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Land

“We write each other notes, back and forth, back and forth. It’s like texting for people with large collections of stationery.”
― Ann Patchett, Whistler

“People have no understanding of how love works,” Eddie said. “They don’t take gratitude into account. They don’t think about relief.”
― Ann Patchett, Whistler

“Lucas had never regained his footing after the demise of Positivity, a franchise dead in the water by 1985. It would have died long before then had it not been for my mother’s publicist tenacity. Once the series was scrubbed, Lucas spent the rest of his life pacing around the yard, or pacing up and down the halls when the weather was bad. He never could stop grumbling, to my mother or my brothers, about the unfairness of it all. To be unable to find something else to write about was one thing, surely that happened all the time, but his inability to take his own advice was a real mark against him.”
― Ann Patchett, Whistler

“An 'eye.' It did not mean the ability to spot the difference between a topaz and a brown diamond, a real Tiffany and a fake, or even some 'soul' in an object that all could attest to; it was to spot the echo in oneself. I scanned the room and could not sense it, but then again, this was a room filled by someone else's impulses and caprices. To find an echo in oneself, one had to know oneself. That seemed an impossibility. Would I ever become a person who bought a bridal shawl and draped it above a work by some well-known artist? Would I ever become a person who asked for a stone to be chipped off a wall?”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“Lisabetta knows the trick to life,” she said, “is knowing what you want.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“She was urging me to share that, but not unprocessed, unfiltered so that it remained in its crude, original form of pain and sorrow, plunked down like a bottle of homemade wine. You must tell it again another time, she had said on our way to Ferrara. Made better, not just for the sake of the listener but for the sake of the teller. To have mastered the story. It is the work of the metallurgist to extract the gold from a clump of earth, and so it was the work of the speaker, I understood at last, to extract and refine, from the admixed events of love and life, the comedy.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“The price for seeing things as they really are. It is our youth.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“I was never moral, only organized.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“I know you think of me as your mother only, but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it?”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years. I had one of those stopovers when the children were young, just before Gilbert died, and Daan and I were happy, even though I didn’t know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one. But who? Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does “hurt” refer to the inflicting or the suffering?”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“And what is choice but a branch of the future grafting itself onto the stem of the present?”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“I was obsessed with the process; he was addicted to the results. But it'd be dishonest to claim it was only an intellectual exercise for me. I discovered a deep well of ambition within. From it I extracted a dark fuel.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“It all came tumbling down in 1926. Back then, I believed it was the end of our marriage. In time, I understood that was when it really started. For I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to. As so many times before, I’ve underestimated the salutary effects of confession! I may just be able to sleep after this.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“The place looked frightening. Dangerously and irreversibly filthy. It smelled of madness. But all this only deepened the love I felt for him right then. A love so tightly intermingled with pity that from that day on I was unable to tell one apart from the other.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I wanted to hold onto the house the way you'd hold onto a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in the world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn't.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate” their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation