Stuart > Stuart's Quotes

“The years return us gradually to the afflictions and shames of childhood, it is a curiosity of existence.”
― Sebastian Barry, Annie Dunne

“After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“The heart was a bicameral thing, both stoical and skittish. Who was to say that it mightn’t endure the years of separation and the abrupt reversals of fate, only to be repulsed by a misaligned vase, by a lipsticked tooth, by a hundredth of an ounce of ash?”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

“Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“If he was indeed an “autodidact,” there’s no doubt he had the world’s shittiest teacher.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

“I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“But then there’s something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“... And now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice.”
― Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

“There was something unnatural, a little unhealthy, about the way she inhaled Veda's smell as she dedicated the rest of her life to this child who had been spared.”
― James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encourageing it. I'm tired of the violence that's on it's way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Love is a source of anxiety until it is source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit. Love raises great expectations in us that it never satisfies; the hopes based on friendship are milder and in the present, and they exist only because they've already been rewarded. Love is a script about just a few repeated themes we have a hard time following, though we make every effort to conform to its tone. Friendship is a permis de séjour that enables us to go anywhere and do anything exactly as our whims dictate.”
― Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

“It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars...The upside was that the city was inexpensive…”
― Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

“He thought it was the job of the church, not the government to care for the poor and hungry. That, to him, was "pure Christianity." When it came to Larraine though, Pastor Daryl believed a lot of hardship was self-inflicted. "She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly..." Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, 'Hey, when I make foolish choices there are consequences.' " It was easy to go on about helping "the poor." Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgement you have recorded, that was a more trying matter.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City