Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
― Steven Wright

“My heart is small, like a love of buttons or black pepper.”
― S. Jane Sloat, In the Voice of a Minor Saint

“For a moment the radio wavered between stations
and I was so busy
making myself marvelous.”
― S. Jane Sloat, In the Voice of a Minor Saint

“God have pity on the smell of gasoline
which finds its way like an arm
through a car window,
more human than kerosene,
more unctuous, more manly.”
― S. Jane Sloat, In the Voice of a Minor Saint

“...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“Je m'appelle Erik Satie comme tout le monde.”
― Erik Satie

“Build a house?" exclaimed John.

"For the Wendy," said Curly.

"For Wendy?" John said, aghast. "Why, she is only a girl!"

"That," explained Curly, "is why we are her servants.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“I might walk vast expanses
of earth and always be beginning
and I love beginning
or could learn
to love it.”
― S. Jane Sloat

“Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?”
― David Markson, Reader’s Block

“English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought.

Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we are reborn into more ample and generous minds. "Life piled on life / Were all too little," says Tennyson's "Ulysses," and he is right. Given the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once? The English major lives many times through the astounding transportive magic of words and the welcoming power of his receptive imagination. The economics major? In all probability he lives but once. If the English major has enough energy and openness of heart, he lives not once but hundreds of times. Not all books are worth being reincarnated into, to be sure—but those that are win Keats's sweet phrase: "a joy forever.”
― Mark Edmundson

“All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.”
― Paul Valéry

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”
― Noam Chomsky

“When this house was built, people used daggers and their fingers,” he said. “And it’ll probably last until the days when men dine off capsules.”

“Fancy asking friends to come over for capsules,” I said.

“Oh, the capsules will be taken in private,” said Father. “By that time, eating will have become unmentionable. Pictures of food will be considered rare and curious, and only collected by rude old gentlemen.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle