Dustin Saunders > Dustin Saunders's Quotes

“the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants.”
― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

“Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read. Rebecca West.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“lately, I’ve been thinking about … who will hold that little air pump for me when it’s my turn. Not because they think it’ll revive me, or save me. But because they want to try.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The more alone I get, the louder the world becomes.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Dark Dark

“I feel something foreign bloom between my husband and me, an intruder, a mold. I see my husband with eyes that don’t know him, as if he quite suddenly became a man from Brazil, or grew a beard, or started speaking in a southern accent. As if after eleven years of marriage he somehow had all of his secrets returned to him, made secret again.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Dark Dark

“This thing comes from us, she would explain in interviews. It rips its way out of us, literally tears us in two, in a was of great pain and blood and shit and piss. If she child does not enter into the world this way, then it is cut from us with a knife. The child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. It is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. And this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutered and sanitized. We are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. Womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“I remember another aphorism of my father's, one that he used to say whenever we passed someone pissing openly in the street: add color to life when you can.”
― Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now.”
― Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn

“Plants have lived in the Now for a long time but they still have to have some things explained to them.”
― Joy Williams, The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

“The color blue fills the entire mirror and, watching it, I think that is how a small northern town in America works. It enlists one beautiful thing like the ocean or the mountains or the snow to keep people stuck and stagnant and staring out to sea forever.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“There is a not-small part of me that can't help but see a thing through to its disappointing end.”
― Kimberly King Parsons, Black Light

“Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“The damp wind kissed her flushed neck and pushed down inside her dress. It felt like a stranger’s hand, a sign of living, a reminder of life.”
― Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain

“With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“a person only has to step sideways for everything to look different.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, The Morning Star

“I am offering the only thing I have. I am holding out my hand, feeding myself to the hungry future.”
― Maggie Smith, Goldenrod: Poems

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“A good window lets the outside participate.”
― Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

“Blood was the wine of the spirit, was it not?”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

“This could be your family, Celia shouted. Your brother, your son, your father. This could be your loss. But it's not. It's mine, and you might think you're lucky, but for every lucky person, unluckiness arrives. Our existence shouldn't depend on luck. It should depend on justice, what is good, what is right.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Woman of Light

“Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“We spent so much time looking for pieces of ourselves in other people that we never realized they were busy searching for the same things in us.”
― Kristen Arnett, Mostly Dead Things

“Problem solving is hunting.
It is savage pleasure and we are born to it. —Thomas Harris”
― Kristen Arnett, Mostly Dead Things