Vanja > Vanja's Quotes

“When we open ourselves
you yourself to me and I myself to you,
when we submerge
you into me and I into you
when we vanish
into me you and into you I

Then
am I me
and you are you.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Listen, I don't care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset, and I'm limp, by God. Anything. Peter Pan. Even before the curtain goes up at Peter Pan I'm a goddamn puddle of tears.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“This is God's universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what's ego and what isn't.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll's head around
To look at me.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Why's it so sunny?" she repeated.
Zooey observed her rather narrowly. "I bring the sun wherever I go, buddy," he said.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“The connection was so bad, and I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn't as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“You can kill a man with those words.
No gun.
No bullets.
Just words and a girl.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“She places her hands around my neck and rests her head on my shoulder. I can smell the sex on her, and my hope is that she can smell the love on me.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“Believe it or not – it takes a lot of love to hate you like this.”
― Markus Zusak, The Messenger

“It was like she held a string and pulled on it just slightly to open me up. She got in, put a piece of herself inside me, and left again. In there, somewhere, I still feel it.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“But fishing, as we know, in libraries or anywhere else, is a tricky business, with never a certainty of who's going to catch whom.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“He looked at me with his eyes shining—yes, shining. The boy’s eyes could shine.”
― J.D. Salinger, Three Stories

“I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close