max theodore > max theodore's Quotes

“I guess my question is: Is the new you the stranger? Or is the stranger the person you leave behind?" -Sherm”
― Rebecca Stead, Goodbye Stranger

“We never see any boats. But you man the light anyway--just in case. And WE got to see it--all these years. The great light. The beautiful sweeping beam! We were here to see it, and that was enough....Weed your mind. And man the great light. Even when no one is looking.”
― Matthew Quick, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“As for us, if we were compelled to choose between the barbarians of civilization and the civil advocates of barbarism, we would choose the barbarians.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Still, if you've got to bring yourself within inches of your life just to cry for help, something's wrong somewhere. Either you weren't yelling loud enough to begin with, or the people around you are deaf, dumb, and blind. Which makes me think it isn't just a cry for help - it's more a cry to be taken seriously. A cry that says "I'm hurting so badly, the world must, for once, come to a grinding halt for me."

The question is, what do you do next?”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“There are two things you know. One: You were there. Two: You couldn’t have been there.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
― Pirkei Avot

“Man and woman: they're both familiar and foreign. Like beautiful pasture planets I travel in my dreams, speaking each language with a heavy accent.”
― Pat Schmatz, Lizard Radio

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

“TONY: You know what you're saying, don't you?
ALICE: What?
TONY: That you'd rather spend the summer with me than with anybody else.
ALICE: Was I?
TONY: Well, if it's true about the summer, how would you feel about — the winter?
ALICE: Yes, I'd — like that too.
TONY (tremulous): Then there's spring and autumn. If you could — see your way clear about those, Miss Sycamore?
ALICE: I might.
TONY: I guess that's the whole year. We haven't forgotten anything, have we?”
― Moss Hart, You Can't Take it With You

“He’s not even interested in the treasure. The whole point is the adventure. At least, for his crew, that’s the point. The last true poets of the sea, he calls them. People for whom discovery—like, the concept of the journey—is the treasure itself.”
― Julia Drake, The Last True Poets of the Sea

“He was a jellyfish being asked to float on land. Maybe life, for him, would always be hard.”
― Julia Drake, The Last True Poets of the Sea

“Him, her, a whale, you, what does it matter? You both saw the wreck, and you both swam up.”
― Julia Drake, The Last True Poets of the Sea

“For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to. Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. Those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“You don't fall in love with a gender, Anna-Lena. You fall in love with an idiot.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“When Knut was lying in his sickbed those last nights, she asked him: "Are you scared?" He replied: "Yes." Then his fingers ran through her hair and he added: "But it'll be quite nice to get a bit of peace and quiet. You can put that on the headstone." Estelle laughed hard at that. When he left her she wept so hard that she couldn't breathe. Her body was never really the same after that, she curled up and never quite unfurled again.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“If we were angels once, why did we end up lower?" asked Nikolai. "No, that can't be!"

"Not lower, who told you it's lower?...How do I know what I used to be?”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“But does it make any difference now?" he thought. "And what will be there, and what has been done here? Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life I didn't and still don't understand...”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world.”
― Czesław Miłosz, The Separate Notebooks