Carly > Carly's Quotes

“It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.”
― Nick Hornby

“Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.”
― Billy Collins

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“There it is.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them.”
― John Waters

“Keep passing the open windows.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.”
― Edith Sitwell

“The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless : Tales of Transgression

“I wish there really was such a thing as a Time-Clock Puncher, though. I wish some gigantic, surly, stone-fisted Soap Mahoney-type guy went around the world smashing every clock in sight till there weren't any more and people got so confused about when to go to the mill or school or church that they gave up and did something interesting instead.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“Vade Mecum

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.”
― Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”
― Norman Mailer, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison

“The only truth is music.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably ...”
― Nick Hornby, Songbook

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.”
— Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain”
― Anatole Broyard

“Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders

“The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“My life is a reading list.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
― Tom Waits

“I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green