Christa > Christa's Quotes

“I made an egg salad sandwich and took a bite of it over the open silverware drawer. A piece of egg salad fell in among the forks. I swore softly with my mouth full. Another piece of egg salad fell in.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.”
― Nicole Krauss, Great House

“To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”
― John Cheever

“Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they'd be.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Once you know a thing you can’t ever unknow it.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“You get into habits. Ways of being with certain people.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“Poetry is prose in slow motion.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“Don't you know? That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow." "That doesn't make any sense. If you were so happy, then you'd want to stay alive, wouldn't you? You'd want to be alive forever, so you could keep being happy." ...
"No, no. It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel like they've been shortchanged.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“darkness falls upon Humanity
and faces become terrible
things
that wanted more than there
was.

all our days are marked with
unexpected
affronts - some
disastrous, others
less so
but the process is
wearing and
continuous.
attrition rules.
most give
way
leaving
empty spaces
where people should
be.

and now
as we ready to self-destruct
there is very little left to
kill

which makes the tragedy
less and more
much much
more.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there's just temperature.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn't take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.

Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it's not -- it's luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Isn’t that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don’t?”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. You had to choose one or the other was Everly’s feeling. Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn’t have both.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger...”
― Sarah Waters