Tumgik
quotespile · 25 minutes
Quote
Most schools have a loud system of loud bells, which startle the students and teachers at regular intervals and remind them that time is passing even more slowly than it seems.
Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
7 notes · View notes
quotespile · 3 hours
Text
“I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don’t like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground.”
— Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
168 notes · View notes
quotespile · 19 hours
Quote
Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?
Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
78 notes · View notes
quotespile · 22 hours
Text
“The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable.”
— Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
180 notes · View notes
quotespile · 1 day
Quote
Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes.
Richard Powers, The Overstory
49 notes · View notes
quotespile · 1 day
Text
“It’s a wonder I’m even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can’t believe I haven’t killed myself. But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.”
— Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors
230 notes · View notes
quotespile · 2 days
Quote
Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep – living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.
Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life
219 notes · View notes
quotespile · 2 days
Text
“The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it’s the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me.”
— Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
27 notes · View notes
quotespile · 2 days
Quote
You ever feel like home is the one place you can’t go back to? It’s like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I’ll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can’t go back because the house expects something from you.
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
38 notes · View notes
quotespile · 2 days
Text
“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
306 notes · View notes
quotespile · 3 days
Quote
She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.
Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens
19 notes · View notes
quotespile · 3 days
Text
“Destiny is a good thing to accept when it’s going your way. When it isn’t, don’t call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.”
— Joseph Heller, God Knows
147 notes · View notes
quotespile · 3 days
Quote
You undergo your own incarceration. You may witness your demise piece by piece. You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much.
Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace
59 notes · View notes
quotespile · 3 days
Text
“Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on ‘motherfucker.’”
— Colson Whitehead, The Noble Hustle
124 notes · View notes
quotespile · 4 days
Quote
Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
57 notes · View notes
quotespile · 4 days
Text
“I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I’d participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.”
— Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
65 notes · View notes
quotespile · 4 days
Quote
I have learned, though, that there is a river of humanity. Though I still don't know what lies at the end of that flowing river. But I feel as though I've started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past. What I can believe in now is the sight of all the people, each carrying his or her own individual burdens, praying at this deep river. I believe that the river embraces these people and carries them away. A river of humanity. The sorrows of this deep river of humanity. And I am a part of it.
Shūsaku Endō, Deep River
56 notes · View notes