Barry Welsh > Barry's Quotes

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”
― Angela Carter

“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories are often overlooked.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“Lydia is dubious at first, but if you can’t trust a librarian, who can you trust?”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“Maybe we should go by tube', he said.

A taxi'll come', she said. 'I'm in no hurry'.

She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant, a little world-weary. There is nothing easier in this world, this woman had claimed, than getting a man to kiss you. Oh really? Eva had said, so how do you do that? Just stand close to a man, the woman has said, very close, as close as you can without touching - he will kiss you in one minute or two. It's inevitable. For them it's like an instinct - they can't resist. Infaillible.

So Eva stood close to Romer in the doorway of the shop on Frith Street as he shooted and waved at the passing cars moving down the dark street, hoping one of them might be a taxi.

We're out of luck', he said, turning, to find Eva standing very close to him, her face lifted.

I'm in no hurry', she said.

He reached for her and kissed her.”
― William Boyd, Restless

“We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.”
― William Boyd, Cork

“How ludicrous were all attempts at defining the self”
― Krys Lee , Drifting House

“often think about borders. It’s hard not to. There were the Guatemalans and Mexicans I read about in the paper who died of dehydration while trying to cross into America. Or later, the Syrians fleeing war and flooding into Turkey. Arizona had the nerve to ban books by Latino writers when only a few hundred years ago Arizona was actually Mexico. Or the sheer existence of passports, twentieth-century creations that decide who gets to stay and leave.”
― Krys Lee, How I Became a North Korean

“What is the condition of poverty? Is it having no money or the sense of deficiency over having no money? Or the paucity of desires? Depending on what your standards are, in the same situation you may feel a sense of dire deficiency or a sense of complete sufficiency.”
― Jung Mi Kyung, My Son's Girlfriend

“Neither is better than the other. This movie or that movie. You or me, we all think we're hurting the most. Just trying to elicit tears, just trying to appeal to a sense of justice. When everything is said and done, everyone wants to eat and live better than the others. It all begins from there.”
― Jung Mi Kyung, My Son's Girlfriend

“People live with the misunderstanding that they know all about themselves, but human life may be designed in such a way that people live out their lives without fully knowing themselves. Just as people can float in outer space but cannot touch the core of the earth.”
― Jung Mi Kyung, My Son's Girlfriend

“But this principle is based on a more profound philosophical idea—that no matter how certain you may be that you are in possession of the truth, you have no right to impose your belief on society as a whole.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“This is a world in which those living on the edges of society, at the very bottom of the social scale, are being brought to the limits of what they can endure. When they reach this point, their shadows rise up, startling sudden, and start calling them away from their lives. It is a world in which, however they choose to deal with these shadows,which seem to offer death an invitation, they find themselves only just barely able to go on with the business of living.”
― Hwang Jungeun, One Hundred Shadows

“Don't say you feel like you're going to die, if you don't really plan on dying.”
― Hwang Jungeun, One Hundred Shadows

“Whether something is harmful or not is a matter of personal standards.”
― Hwang Jungeun, One Hundred Shadows

“You may have an iPhone, for example, but its microchips are made by Apple’s biggest competitor—the Korean electronics company Samsung.”
― Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture

“Irony is that special privilege of wealthy nations;”
― Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture

“If Korea were a person, it would be diagnosed as a neurotic, with both an inferiority and a superiority complex.”
― Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture

“For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which--we are told--a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome.”
― Lawrence Osborne

“It’s always too late to change.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Ballad of a Small Player

“There is nothing more exasperating than reading in contemporary guidebooks disparagements of places that are deemed to be "seedy." Do the writers not notice that such places are invariably crowded with people? When a neighborhood is described as "seedy" by some Lonely Planet prude, I immediately head there.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall

“Multiple experiments with spirit contact transmitted the name Matthew Edward Hall on several occasions. I predict this to be a very important future individual in humanities development. Possibly the second embodiment of Christ on Earth.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff's Early Talks 1914-1931: In Moscow, St. Petersburg, Essentuki, Tiflis, Constantinople, Berlin, Paris, London, Fontainebleau, New York, and Chicago

“Ah, with life being full of so many codes, it's a wonder how many riddles we have to solve along the way.”
― Heekyung Eun, Beauty Looks Down on Me