Meredith > Meredith's Quotes

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“You want to know what Classics are?" said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. "I'll tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?”
― John Waters, Role Models

“(The subject of Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows, I realize, is a digression away from the Oneida Community, and yet, I do feel compelled, indeed almost conspiracy theoretically bound to mention that one of the reasons the Oneida Community broke up and turned itself into a corporate teapot factory is that a faction within the group, led by a lawyer named James William Towner, was miffed that the community’s most esteemed elders were bogarting the teenage virgins and left in a huff for none other than Orange County, California, where Towner helped organize the Orange County government, became a judge, and picked the spot where the Santa Ana courthouse would be built, a courthouse where, it is reasonable to assume, Peter Gallagher’s attorney on The O.C. might defend his clients.)”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“I used to think John Waters movies were on the outlandish side until I came to Maryland. Klam and I stop for lunch at a dark roadside joint that feels like more of a throw-back than the Surratt House ever could. The vegetable of the day is succotash to give you an idea. Technically, it’s a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“It's that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“She felt almost guilty that she had handed some of her grief to him, and then she felt close to him for his willingness to take it and hold it, in all its rawness, all its dark confusion.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“Nowadays the Internet is my chubby friend.”
― Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance: An Investigation

“It has always been a great comfort to me that I could bring a book anywhere, to any place. To any part of my life.”
― Anton DiSclafani, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

“I tried to explain as much as I could," Poppet says. "I think I made an analogy about cake."
"Well, that must have worked," Widget says. "Who doesn't like a good cake analogy?”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“I am haunted by the ghost of my father, I think that should allow me to quote Hamlet as much as I please.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Trespassers Will Be Exsanguinated.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Prospero the Enchanter's immediate reaction upon meeting his daughter is a simple declaration of: "Well, fuck.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Once they were librarians, but that is a subject they will only discuss if heavily intoxicated.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“I was sad that summer was over. But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.”
― B.J. Novak, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

“In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“Visiting his neighbours’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“Not all shabby is chic, just like not every porn actor is a star.”
― Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number: Essays

“I was thinking I might want to study public health, but I was also thinking I might want to move to the forest and eat berries and mushrooms and hibernate with the bears in the winter.”
― Lauren Holmes, Barbara the Slut and Other People

“Girl scouts didn't teach me what to do with emotionally unstable drunk boys.”
― Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

“Soap?"
"School of America in Paris" he explains. "SOAP".
Nice. My father sent me here to be cleansed.”
― Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

“Callipygian. Having shapely buttocks. Nice one, Bridge.”
― Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

“I don't know.  I don't really like old movies.  The acting is so, 'Hey buddy, ol' pal.  Let's go wear our hats and have a big misunderstanding”
― Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

“Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History