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“And then I asked myself whether originality did indeed prove that great writers are gods, ruling each over a kingdom that is his alone, or whether there is not an element of sham in it all, whether the differences between one man's books and another's were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between diverse personalities.”

“Time had slowed to a sluggish crawl. I walked faster, but each step plunged me deeper into the depths of still-ness. If time could pass so slowly that its passage was im-perceptible, then—is death where time stops and the self is left all alone in this space? Is death where space and the self are erased and only time continues? Where had Köichi gone to? Had he really disappeared completely?”

“A terrible panic that had no name came over her as she realized that many of the sweet babies in the world were born to come to something like this old man some day. She had to get out of that place or it would happen to her. Suddenly she would be an old woman with toothless gums and feet that disgusted people.”

“She looked at the two envelopes, […] wondering how strange it was that everything about him seemed remote. And not only that, but everything else that had happened in Brooklyn seemed as though it had almost dissolved and was no longer richly present for her. […] She went through all of it as though she were trying to recover what had seemed so filled with detail, so solid, just a few weeks before.”

“But like those persons recently decorated who, their investiture once accomplished, would like to see the fountain of honour turned off at the main, Mme Bontemps would have preferred that, after herself, no one else in her own circle should be made known to the Princess.”

“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”

“As Emmett walked out the door and climbed into his bright yellow car, I thought to myself that there are surely a lot of big things in America. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. The Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon are big. The skies over the prairie are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man's opinion of himself.”

“The great heroic tries were like a diamond on its side […] but itwasn't simply the lives of the renowned that conform to this geometry […] The manner in which the convergence takes you by surprise, that is the cruelest part […] For at the moment when the turning begins, the two opposing rays of your life are so far from each other you could never discern the change in their trajectory.”

“There is just enough variety in human experience for every single person in a city the size od New York to feel with assurance that their experience is unique. And this is a wonderful thing. Because to aspire, to fall in love, to yumble as we do and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been experienced quite as we have experienced it.”

“For each day, she thought, she needed a whole other day to contemplate what had happened and store it away, get it out of her system so that it did not keep her awake at night or fill her dreams”

“But you should take heart, young man, that within the walls of the Statler Building, he who misrepresents himself well, represents himself best.”

“At the Sunshine Hotel, for every room there was […] an artifact bearing witness. Like an empty bottle that has rolled under the bed, or a feathered deck of cards on the nightstand, or a bright pink kimono on a hook. Some evidence of that one desire so delectable, so insatiable that it overshadowed all others, eclipsing even the desires for a home, a family, or a sense of human dignity.”

“our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; […] if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.

“The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular mo-ment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”

finished volume 1

“Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given mo-ment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.”

“she added with the wisdom invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.”

“To know a thing does not always enable us to prevent it, but at least the things we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, and this gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.”

“Like everyone who possesses something precious, in order to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it, he had detached the precious object from his mind, leaving, as he thought, everything else in the same state as when it was there. But the absence of one part from a whole is not only that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a derangement of all the other parts.”

“But in this strange phase of love the personality of another person becomes so enlarged, so deepened, that the curiosity which he now felt stirring inside him with regard to the smallest details of a woman's daily life, was the same thirst for knowledge with which he had once studied history.”

“Just as it is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by a nobleman but by an oaf that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated.”

“The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them.”

“This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, […] cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them.”

“The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.”

yea boi gonna dnf this

'Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live.'

"You can basically define someone by the stuff they like, Tress. It's what sets us apart, you know? We talk about how important culture is, but what is culture? It ain't government, or lan-guage, or any of that hokum. No, it's the stuff we like. Plays, stories, marble collections."

“If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.”