Nicholas Schutle > Nicholas's Quotes

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.”
― Don DeLillo

“With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture—all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.”
― Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

“My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.”
― E.M. Forster

“The world is full of places to which I want to return”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum

“I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“Yeah, well, I wanted to be a screenwriter, and guess what? I am one. That's the other tragedy in life.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum

“You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.”
― Chuck Klosterman

“Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Chet suddenly wished she had quit teaching the class because of him, that he’d had any effect on her at all.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“her knees, which looked, in the faint blue light, as though they'd been carved by water from a bar of soap.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum

“It's hard to kill yourself by taking Tylenol. You die from liver failure, which takes a long time...”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum

“You all have stories, Sandy said. And we have secrets”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum

“Religion is the opiate of the people!”
― Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

“Were we just two more rootless jungle-dwelling erotomaniacs creamining in their pre-faded jeans over Historical New England, dreaming the old agrarian dream in their rent-a-car convertible”
― Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

“Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man—the man with the right to existence—a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbor’s womankind? I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities?”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“There is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“My ideal life is a quiet one. I like to read, to sit still in the same chair, with the lampshade at a certain angle, alone, or with Meagan nearby, and now and then, if I'm lucky, I'll come across a lovely phrase or fine sentiment, look up from my book, and feel the harmony of some notion, the justice of it, and know that everything is there. That's life to me, those privately discovered moments. ”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum

“Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904

“He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904