Jen > Jen's Quotes

“The only way to get what we want from life is to ask for it.” I”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“It’s a sea of death,” Universo said. “But the water remembers what civilization tries to forget.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“I think of my mother and how, when I was a child, she'd take me into the water with her and I felt time suspended in her embrace. How badly I've wanted to return to those moments. We remained under the same roof, but the years pulled us apart, so we could never recover the softness I felt from her under the sun, amid the waves.

Here, in the open ocean, with nobody to hold me at the surface but myself, I become sad for what's become of my mother and me, the ways life hardened us to one another.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she'd learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother's hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“Mo and the staff talk about captivity like it's the best thing a dolphin can hope for, but that kind of talk just makes me think of Carlito and all the years he spent trapped by the routines of prison life in a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, the size of a parking space, and what Dr. Joe used to say about inmates like my brother who were also sentenced to solitary confinement: 'It doesn't have to be violent for it to be torture.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“Again, I think of Carlito. The years I tried to serve his sentence with him, and how he let me. Maybe it was wrong of me, but sometimes I hoped that he'd see in my eyes how I'd stopped living for anything and anyone but him, and that he would tell me not to come back.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“There’s not one living thing on this planet that doesn’t scream to survive.” I”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist

“Why would anyone who is deeply satisfied with reality, with real life as it is lived, dedicate himself to something as insubstantial and fanciful as the creation of fictional realities? Naturally, those who rebel against lie as it is, using their ability to invent different lives and different people, may do so for any number of reasons, honorable or dishonorable, generous or selfish, complex or banal. The nature of this basic questioning of reality, which to my mind lies at the heart of every literary calling, doesn't matter at all. What matters is that the rejection be strong enough to fuel the enthusiasm for a task as quixotic as tilting at windmills – the slight-of-hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist

“My impression is that life—a big word, I know—inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.
”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver’s head. ‘Hey, bus driver,’ I said. ‘Can I smoke?’ ‘May I,’ said the bus driver. ‘I love you,’ I said.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Love is like falconry," he said. "Don't you think that's true, Cleveland?"
"Never say love is like anything." said Cleveland. "It isn't.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Meeting a namesake is one of the most delicate and most brief surprises.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“To paraphrase the disappeared Jimmy Hoffa, who certainly didn’t go down in history for his foolish worries: “Eighty-five percent of what you worry about won’t ever come to pass. And you can always deal with that other fifteen percent.” Of course, look what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.”
― M.A. Harper, The Worst Day Of My Life, So Far

“That’s all they discussed, those neighbors of my mother’s: who had died; who was just about to drop dead; who was getting married to whom, so that they could have a miserable life together and then die.”
― M.A. Harper, The Worst Day Of My Life, So Far

“Let beloved idiots ruin their own lives, if that’s what they’re dead set on doing, with no attempt whatsoever at control or behavior modification from you.”
― M.A. Harper, The Worst Day Of My Life, So Far