Katherine Catapang

“Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.”
― George Orwell, Books v. Cigarettes

“I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“every relationship contains within it the ghosts, or the shadows, of all the other relationships it isn’t. All the abandoned alternatives, the forgotten choices, the lives you could have led but didn’t and haven’t.”
― Julian Barnes, Love, Etc