Allegra > Allegra's Quotes

“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at.”
― W.H. Auden

“He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

“She was actively frightened of imparting confidences, because she feared that they might betray the world of oddness that lived inside her”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

“In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said.

Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing."

"Self-inflicted. You pathetic American."

"Different kind of prison" Chip said.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Asfixia

“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Asfixia

“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“I often cannot believe the things I do.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
― W H Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

“Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.”
― W.H. Auden

“Love each other or perish”
― Auden

“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
― W.H. Auden

“Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”
― W.H. Auden

“All I ever wanted was to know what to do.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!