Roch > Roch's Quotes

“Armand felt his skin tingle, and the sudden overwhelming need to get up. To go. To do something. To stop it. It was like an out-of-body experience, so powerful was the urge to act.

He gripped the edge of the bench, closed his eyes, and did as Myrna had taught him.
Deep breath. In. And out.

“And don’t just breathe,” he heard her calm, melodic voice. “Inhale. Take in the smells. Listen to the sounds. The real world. Not the one you’re conjuring.”

He breathed in, and smelled the pine forest, smelled the damp earth. Felt the cool, fresh morning air on his cheeks. He heard, far off, the excited yapping of a puppy. And he followed that back. The puppy led him through the howls and shrieks and alarms in his head.
He held on to the sound. To the scents. As Myrna had taught him.

“Follow anything you can,” she’d advised. “Back to reality. Back from the edge.” And he did. Deep breath in. The cut grass, the sweet hay by the side of the road. Deep breath out.

And finally, when the alarms were dulled and his heart stopped pounding, pounding, he thought he could hear the forest itself. The leaves not rustling, but murmuring to him. Telling him he’d made it. Home. He was safe…And once again he was saved. He was surprised by joy.”
― Louise Penny, The Long Way Home

“The mind is its own place, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,”
― Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder

“Don’t believe everything you think.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Control your thoughts and you can control your emotions. Do you trust me?”
― Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead

“Fear distorts the world. Fear sees demons where only shadows dwell.”
― Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods

“Well, for each of us the brain creates a whole, unique universe. It contains everything we know. Everything we see or touch. Everything we feel and remember. In a sense, our brains create all of reality for us. Without the brain, there's nothing. Some people find this idea scary, but I think it's rather beautiful.”
― Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods

“Negative thoughts back you into a corner,” her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadow Park. “They multiply and surround you. Don’t think of what you don’t have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“Don’t get me wrong, I believe in using your head. But not in spending too much time in there. Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.”
― Louise Penny, The Long Way Home

“When life seems too cruel, and there seems too little love in it. When you feel you have failed. When you don't know what the point is. When you cannot go on. I want you to draw strength from me then. I want you to remember how much I cherished you, how I lived for you. When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

“She shifted her seat and shoved the thought aside. After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it. Her father had jokingly accused her of living in the wreckage of her future. Until one day she’d looked deep into his eyes and saw he wasn’t joking. He was warning her.”
― Louise Penny, The Long Way Home

“One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: "Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever --or not?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“If you had to relive your life exactly as it was – same successes and failures, same happiness, same miseries, same mixture of comedy and tragedy – would you want to? Was it worth it?”
― Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods

“Beyond a certain age, a journey across the city becomes uncomfortably reflective...One day I too will prompt a moment's reflection in the passenger of a passing cab.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“That was why she was happy. He now knew that happiness and kindness went together. There was not one without the other.”
― Louise Penny, The Long Way Home

“This felt special. Like showing someone your private chapel, your secret haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others. This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Fear not. It will come. At least I hope it does. And when you least expect it. Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember: I am here. Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it’s not with me that you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did.” I looked at him. This was the moment when I should lie and tell him he was totally off course. I was about to.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“In a life filled with great good fortune of health, of creativity, of friends, living in safety and privilege with the loving partner. There was just one bit of misfortune in his life and that was that Peter Morrow seemed to have no idea how very fortunate he was.”
― Louise Penny, The Long Way Home

“A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets...”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Au-delà d'un certain âge, traverser la ville donne désagréablement à penser. Les adresses des morts s'accumulent.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“This time she paused to peer out of the window at the dusk and wonder where her sister was. Drowned in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motor car, she thought ritually, a sound principal being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Exhaustion made him vulnerable to the thoughts he wanted least.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’ ‘You know Thoreau?”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself, and, not just in Marin, but in the whole region, in the Bay Area, and in many other places too, places both near and far, the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the result was something not unlike relief.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“But while fear was part of what kept them together for those first few months in Marin, more powerful than fear was the desire that each see the other find firmer footing before they let go, and thus in the end their relationship did in some senses come to resemble that of siblings, in that friendship was its strongest element, and unlike many passions, theirs managed to cool slowly, without curdling into its reverse, anger, except intermittently. Of this, in later years, both were glad, and both would also wonder if this meant that they had made a mistake, that if they had but waited and watched their relationship would have flowered again, and so their memories took on a potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner