Jean > Jean's Quotes

“The adjunct seems paler than usual. He isn't speaking in complete sentences. Would it be possible to...? Do you mind if...?

They say when you're lonely you start to lose words.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Rifles

“You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it. ”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“Hope was based on the unknown, and I liked knowing things. Like that I was going to fail. Failure had better odds. ”
― Nami Mun, Miles from Nowhere

“There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost. ”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“Potential has a shelf life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.”
― John Steinbeck

“Art cannot save anybody from anything.”
― Gilbert Sorrentino, The Moon in Its Flight

“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It's like I was raising chickens inside me. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I've got going, I have to wonder. Sure, I get by. But in the end, that's not the question, is it? ”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss--you have gone and lost something else.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love? ”
― Rick Moody, Demonology

“Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“Socrates had it backward. He thought the unexamined life is not worth living. I think no one's life holds up to examination. The more time you spend thinking the more you notice that everyone else is doing something better or more important than you.”
― David R. Dow, The Autobiography of an Execution

“Judgment helps one to make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate.”
― Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng

“[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end. ”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“It was at that moment that I came to the conclusion that there is some link between plants and loneliness. ”
― Adam Rapp, The Year of Endless Sorrows

“I knew that we'd never get there. I knew this, in the same way I knew Tati would never be a teacher, and that Benny would be the end of me. Life's about confirming what we already know. About making sure. ”
― Nami Mun, Miles from Nowhere

“My ambition is to not embarrass myself--which, if you know me, is a pretty serious ambition.”
― David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“I suppose memory has at least two faces, and capricious ones at that.”
― Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng

“I have come to love you in spite of---" Do I want to be loved in spite of?...Does anyone?”
― Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng