Corey > Corey's Quotes

“I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that's extremely easy to terrify.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them. ”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll---then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
― William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddah, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

“The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

“Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”
― Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

“ouch, an egg!”
― Franklin Pierce

“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest