Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“Just tell your story. Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. So just keep going.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.”
― Douglas Coupland, JPod

“Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.”
― Douglas Coupland, JPod

“Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“For years, my life has been flat. I’m not sure how else to describe it. I’ve never admitted it before. I’m not depressed, I don’t think. That’s not what I’m saying. Just flat, listless. So much has felt accidental, unnecessary, arbitrary. It’s been lacking a dimension. Something seems to be missing.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It dominates. There’s not much I can do about it. Trust me. It doesn’t go away. It’s there whether I like it or not. It’s there when I eat. When I go to bed. It’s there when I sleep. It’s there when I wake up. It’s always there. Always.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“They stay together because it’s expected, because it’s what they know. They try to make it work, to endure it, and end up living under some kind of spiritual anesthetic. They go on, but they are numb. And the more I think about, the more I think there’s nothing worse than to live your life this way. Detached, but abiding. It’s immoral.”
― Iain Reid, Foe

“But what would the work mean if it was endless? What would a relationship mean if it kept going forever? What would a day be if it didn’t end?”
― Iain Reid, We Spread

“I believe the stars are the headlights of angels driving from heaven to save us
to save us...Won't you look at the sky?
They're driving from heaven into our eyes. And though final words are so hard to devise, I promise that I'll always remember your pretty eyes.”
― David Berman

“...and my signature is drawn in magic marker
on the lower right hand corner of the window

so when something passes in the dark
it's captured for a moment inside my work.”
― David Berman, Actual Air

“He stood and watched the night push itself into the bar and the light push it back out.”
― David Berman, Actual Air

“As a way of getting in touch with my origins
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment and the first thing I do”
― David Berman

“to be able to live your life without considering every action in the light of practical necessity seems to me an almost unacceptable privilege.”
― Rachel Cusk, Parade

“When G tried to see her, he simply saw his effect on her, saw in other words himself. Another man looking at her would see something different – this, he realised, was what he was unable to tolerate. It was unbearable that she could take his power of sight away from him and still be seen by everyone else.”
― Rachel Cusk, Parade

“When it came to love, we found ourselves confronting a foreign language. We did not know how to estimate or value things that were free. The things that were free – sex, conversation, the smell of grass in summer – unsettled us. We sought to commodify them and create outcomes from them. But they seemed to belong to everybody: we couldn’t keep them for ourselves.”
― Rachel Cusk, Parade

“The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“—————— I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else? That’s what I’d like to call disorganization, and I’d have the confidence to venture on, because I would know where to return afterward: to the previous organization. I’d rather call it disorganization because I don’t want to confirm myself in what I lived — in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don’t have the fortitude for another.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Perder-se é um achar-se perigoso.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“How long do we have to just survive? When will we be able to live rather than just focus on surviving?”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“It's really hard to put into words things that are just a little bit not okay.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“I needed to face the emptiness, an emptiness I had dreamed of so often I’d turned it into a mast, a center of gravity to hold onto when life fell to pieces around me.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“She tells me to take some time off and settle into the new place. 'Do your own thing. Time off.' Language is and always will be an occupied territory. I have the feeling I was shackled to it the moment I was born. Only language can help you belong somewhere and make sure you don't lose your way. It's a nourishing underlayer that seems to live in the mind, migrate down to the mouth, and, spoken, melt on the lips. At the same time, language is everywhere, occupying the body's farthest-flung cells, pushing them to unimaginable places. It urges you on and turns your stomach, confuses your animal instincts, makes you human. No emotion is more indulgent than the feeling that you are intensely human. Though it can also be the most tyrannical. You are responsible for every word, and no statement is innocent.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“I listen with all five senses, I listen to her with my entire body, with everything but my heart, which feels like it wants to thrash the hell out of me. This wasn't part of our plan. The truth is we'd never made any plans, we'd just taken huge bites out of life.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“But all this tunneling has opened rifts through which the captive parts of me have started to emerge. I realize that I am smoke, that the things that define me rise as they would up a chimney, probing every crack, searching for a wellspring of light or cold, a cupola of sky to sprawl into.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“Sometimes, Samsa’s make me wonder if I’ve made a mistake loving her with such ease. But it means everything to hold her in my arms, her body steadfast to mine, happiness flowing from her limbs like the vigorous power of a god, knowing without a doubt that this is my all.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“What was I thinking, dropping everything? The devastating possibility of the same old job, of a tiny room in a suburban apartment, of lovers as fleeting as shooting stars, hot to the touch one day, a distant dream the next.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder