Therese > Therese's Quotes

“As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“And if someone felt that his life had been an utter failure, and that he himself was only one among millions of wholly unimportant people who could be replaced as easily as broken windowpanes, he would go and pour out his heart to Momo. And, even as he spoke, he would come to realize by some mysterious means that he was absolutely wrong: that there was only one person like himself in the whole world, and that, consequently, he mattered to the world in his own particular way.

Such was Momo's talent for listening.”
― Michael Ende (Momo)

“Split second glimpses into souls are all I have managed to find.”
― Soren Narnia, Tyrant, Draw Thy Sword

“The truest tales require time and familiarity to become what they are.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“No sex?" He looked at me in disbelief. "Well if you can't have ze sex, what can you do?"

For the sake of simplicity I took my left arm and lined it up just under my collarbones. "Nothing below here," I said. I took my right arm and lined it up to my knees. "Nothing above here."

"What about your armpit?" he asked. "Can your boyfriend do anything he wants to your armpit?"

I thought about it. Armpits seemed pretty harmless. "Yeah," I said optimistically. "My boyfriend can do anything he wants to my armpit."

"This is good," the Frenchman said. "He can stick his penis in and out of your armpit, and if you grow hair there it is almost like vagine."

Is it too late to change my answer? I wondered, pulling a cardigan over my bare shoulders and covering any hint of an invitation.”
― Elna Baker, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir

“I did not believe in stalemates. I believed in resolutions, one way or another, and if I found myself on the losing end, so be it. Losing meant quiet, and forgetting quickly, and giving up nothing of any real worth to me. I did not debate restaurant bills, politics, wrongly delivered mail, divorces. These things were officiously loud, and silence was always best.”
― Soren Narnia, A Listing of the Holdings of the National Museum of Romance

“People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.”
― Michael Ende, Momo

“This is what we do. Not so much argue as joust, in jest. We can't stop pushing and pulling the taffy of words and concepts.”
― Larry Duberstein, The Twoweeks

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
― Tom Clancy

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“The soul ... has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“You know what your problem is?" he continued.
"What?"
"You believe a buncha different things, you've lived in a buncha different places, and now, nobody's like you."
"Thanks, Vinny. No one tells you what being unique actually means: that you'll die alone.”
― Elna Baker, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir

“Faith is the highest passion in a man.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.”
― Arthur Miller

“If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! How impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“She filed the image away as an excellent and insulting question to ask the earl at an utterly inappropriate future moment.”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“He was so very large and so very gruff that he rather terrified her, but he always behaved correctly in public, and there was a lot to be said for a man who sported such well-tailored jackets---even if he did change into a ferocious beast once a month.”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“Ivy waved the wet handkerchief, as much as to say, words cannot possibly articulate my profound distress. Then, because Ivy never settled for meaningful gestures when verbal embellishments could compound the effect, she said, "Words cannot possibly articulate my profound distress.”
― Gail Carriger, Changeless

“I am rather fond of ladybugs. They are so delightfully hemispherical.”
― Gail Carriger, Blameless

“She sifted, sighed, and stared up at the ceiling, trying to think about anything but Lord Maccoon, her current predicament, or Lord Akeldama's safety. Which meant she could do nothing but reflect on the complex plight of her mama's more recent embroidery project. Thins, in itself, was a worse torture than any her captors could devise.”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“Oh, Herbert," she said pleadingly to her silent husband, "you must make him marry her! Call for the parson immediately! Look at them... they are...," she sputtered, "canoodling!”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Books can be possessive, can't they? You're walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved there on its own, just to get your attention. Sometimes what's inside will change your life, but sometimes you don't even have to read it. Sometimes it's a comfort just to have a book around. Many of these books haven't even had their spines cracked. 'Why do you buy books you don't even read?' our daughter asks us. That's like asking someone who lives alone why they bought a cat. For company, of course.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen