Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“I am, indeed, pure Frog, but at the same time I am a thing that stands for a world of un-Frog.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“In real life, of course, it is the hare that wins. Every time. Look around you.”
― Anita Brookner

“Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.”
― Percival Everett

“But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”
― Haruki Murakami

“I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.”
― Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

“To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”
― Jean Genet

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself.”
― Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
― Richard Siken

“Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.”
― Dorothy Allison

“I found the idea of being a librarian very appealing--working in a place where people had to whisper and only speak when necessary. If only the world were like that!”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara

“They stay like this, in silence, both aware that they have created something together. Defiance. A pushing back of a darkness that no one has ever pushed at before. A wonderful, criminal liberty to love that which has been so viciously called unlovable.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle