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Monday

12/29/2014

If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?
--Jose Saramago, Blindness

“All right then," said the Savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Friday

12/26/2014

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
--Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Lives Of Bees

The world has a way of keeping things in balance.
--Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

Wednesday

12/24/2014

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.
--Dianne Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.
--Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Monday

12/22/2014

My God, how much there was then to leave behind and forget. For you really had to forget; otherwise you would betray yourself when they insisted. No matter how much you lingered and looked around, the gable always came into sight at last. The first window up there kept its eye on you; someone might be standing there. The dogs, in whom expectation had been growing all day long, ran through the hedges and drove you together into the one they recognized. And the house did the rest. Once you walked in to its full smell, most matters were already decided. A few details might still be changed; but on the whole you were already the person they thought you were; the person for whom they had long ago fashioned a life, out of his small past and their own desires; the creature belonging to them all, who stood day and night under the influence of their love, between their hope and their mistrust, before their approval or their blame.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, The Prodigal Son

However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldn't recognize him anyway. There are those who say we're very fortunate that god chooses not to appear before us, because compared with the shock we would get were such a thing to happen, our fear of death would be mere child's play. Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just another one.
--Jose Saramago, Death With Interruptions

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.
--Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius

Sunday

12/21/2014

Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the roller coaster ride you'd imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'.
--Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
--Anthony Doerr,All The Light We Cannot See

No great thing is created suddenly.
--Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

Friday

12/19/2014

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
--Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.
--Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

No, no, it's not all random, if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely. And the universe doesn't. It takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. Like with parents who adore you blindly. And a big sister who feels guilty for being human over you. And a little gravelly-voiced kid whose friends have left him over you. And even a pink-haired girl who carries your picture in her wallet. Maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. The universe takes care of all its birds.
--R.J.Palacio, Wonder

Wednesday

12/17/2014

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

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Tuesday

12/16/2014

God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.
--Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.
--Virginia Woolf, The Years

There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
--Michael Cunningham, A Home At The End Of The World

Monday

12/15/2014

Stories are a different kind of true.
--Emma Donoghue, Room

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.
--Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth Of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America's Great Migration

He was born a politician.
No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.
--Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Saturday

12/13/2014

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.
--Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
--Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls

Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.
--Toni Morrison, Beloved

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