Elena > Elena's Quotes

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  • #1
    Rudyard Kipling
    “If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;!”
    Rudyard Kipling, If: A Father's Advice to His Son

  • #2
    Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
    “Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
    C.S. Lewis

  • #3
    Ocean Vuong
    “When we left it, the city was still smoldering. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered by the bombed bakery. Broken baguettes. Crushed croissants. Gutted cars. A carousel spinning its blackened horses. He said the shadow of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us.”
    Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

  • #4
    David  Mitchell
    “I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.”
    David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

  • #5
    David  Mitchell
    “This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.”
    David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

  • #6
    Tana French
    “She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. "You should go for younger women," she advised me. "They can't always tell.”
    Tana French, In the Woods

  • #7
    Tana French
    “My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind”
    Tana French, In the Woods

  • #8
    Michael Cunningham
    “We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...”
    Michael Cunningham, The Hours

  • #9
    Michael Cunningham
    “I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I... I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.”
    Michael Cunningham, The Hours

  • #10
    Michael Cunningham
    “There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”
    Michael Cunningham, The Hours

  • #11
    Michael Cunningham
    “These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.”
    Michael Cunningham, The Hours

  • #12
    Michael Cunningham
    “Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”
    Michael Cunningham, The Hours

  • #13
    Michael Cunningham
    “She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.”
    Michael Cunningham, The Hours

  • #14
    Michael Cunningham
    “She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”
    Michael Cunningham, The Hours

  • #15
    “We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love.”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #16
    “...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #17
    “The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #18
    “You know, there's pride, and then there's stupidity”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #19
    “We need readers,” muttered Daniel Chard. “More readers. Fewer writers.”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #20
    “You are not writing properly unless someone is bleeding, probably you.”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #21
    “Like most writers, I tend to find out what I feel on a subject by writing about it. It is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it.”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #22
    “One mellows almost without realizing it's a compensation of age, because anger is exhausting.”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #23
    “I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don’t retract a word. That is a fact.”
    Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

  • #24
    Kelly  Bishop
    “I admit it, given a choice, with a handful of exceptions, I tend to prefer the company of animals to the company of people. Animals are honest—there’s not a hint of pretense about them, they just unapologetically are who they are, and their capacity to love and be loved outshines ours by about a million.”
    Kelly Bishop, The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir

  • #25
    Philip Larkin
    “Morning, noon & bloody night,
    Seven sodding days a week,
    I slave at filthy WORK, that might
    Be done by any book-drunk freak.
    This goes on until I kick the bucket.
    FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT”
    Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

  • #26
    Philip Larkin
    “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
    They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

    But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,
    Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another's throats.

    Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
    Get out as early as you can,
    And don't have any kids yourself.”
    Philip Larkin, High Windows

  • #27
    Philip Larkin
    “How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”
    Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

  • #28
    Philip Larkin
    “I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.”
    Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

  • #29
    Philip Larkin
    “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back”
    Philip Larkin

  • #30
    Philip Larkin
    “Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.”
    Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica



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