quote, well this is me, unquote.

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I decided to stop plugging pwnworks up with my favorite quotes from, well, anywhere, and decided to post them all in a single post instead.

If you guys have any quotes you like, for whatever reasons, feel free to hit this up!

Comments

South of the Border, West of the Sun

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"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a brother or sister?"

"No."

"Why not?"

I picked up the record jacket on the table. It was too dark to read what was written on it. I put the jacket down and rubbed my eyes a couple of times with my wrist. My mother had once asked me the same question. The answer I gave then didn't make her happy or sad. It just puzzled her. But for me it was a totally honest, totally sincere answer.

The things I wanted to say got all jumbled up as I talked, and my explanation seemed to go on forever. But what I was trying to get across was just this: The me that's here now has been brought up without any brothers or sisters. If I did have brothers or sisters I wouldn't be the me I am. So it's unnatural for the me that's here before you to think about what it'd be like to have brothers or sisters...In other words, I thought my mother's question was pointless. (Haruki Murakami)

The Thirteenth Tale

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"The separation of twins is no ordinary separation. Imagine surviving an earthquake. When you come to, you find the world unrecognizable. The horizon is in a different place. The sun has changed color. Nothing remains of the terrain you know. As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living. It's no wonder the survivors of such disasters so often wish they had perished with the others."


"Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline."


"Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories."


"But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you."


"I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events." (Diane Setterfield)

My Sister's Keeper

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Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.(Jodi Picoult)

I hate this book, but it did have a few good gems.

The Kite Runner

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"There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness." (Khaled Hosseini)

Atonement

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The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.


This was exactly what no one would have expected, and of course villians were not announced with hisses or soliloquies, they did not come cloaked in black, with ugly expressions. (Ian McEwan)

The Five People You Meet In Heaven

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"That's the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else." (Mitch Albom)

The Catcher in the Rye

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Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry. (J.D. Salinger)

Girl, Interrupted

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People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy. (Susanna Kaysen)

The Time Traveler's Wife

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"Of course animals have souls. Where did she get that idea?"
"She said the Pope says."
"The Pope's an old meanie. Animals have much nicer souls than we do.
They never tell lies or blow anybody up." (Audrey Niffenegger)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn't try to sleep with people even though they could have. I need to know that these people exist.


I look at people holding hands in the hallways, and I try to think about how it all works. At school dances, I sit in the background, and I tap my toe, and I wonder how many couples will dance to "their song." In the hallways, I see the girls wearing the guys' jacket, and I think about the idea of property. And I wonder if anyone is really happy. I hope they are. I really hope they are. (Stephen Chbosky)

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Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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It's sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.
- Henry Rollins

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Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
- G.K. Chesterton

Inkheart

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She had been right. The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live in. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness--and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. (Cornelia Funke)

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"Real loss is only possible when you love something more than you love yourself."
- Good Will Hunting, the movie

The Reader

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Being ill when you are a child or growing up is such an enchanted interlude!


As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn't stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.


I know that disavowal is an unusual form of betrayal. From the outside it is impossible to tell if you are disowning someone or simply discretion, being considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what you're doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal.


Love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible. (Bernhard Schlink)

The Things They Carried

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...and then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not be a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone-riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria-even dancing, she danced alone-and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved. (Tim O'Brien)

Chaos of the Senses

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It is far easier for us to accept the death of someone we love than to cope with the idea of losing him and discovering that he is able to carry on with his life, in all its intricacies, despite our absence. (Ahlam Mosteghanemi)

Sexing The Cherry

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The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. (Jeanette Winterson)

Into the Land of the Unicorns

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"Chains," said the Tinker, coming up behind her. "They bind us, whether we want them to or not. But a heart without chains would have nothing to hold it, might simply blow away." (Bruce Coville)

The Book of Lost Things

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"The new religion," said Roland dismissively. "The king tried to make others follow it when he still had the will to do so, and the power to enforce that will. Now that he broods in his castle, his chapels lie empty."

"What do you believe in?" asked David.

"I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?" (John Connolly)

Hunter S Thompson

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"I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes."

Carol Ann Duffy

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... My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

Haruki Murakami

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"I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing."

An excerpt from his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize on February 16, 2009.

Written on the Body

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"In bereavement books they tell you to sleep with a pillow pulled down beside you. Not quite a Dutch wife, that is a bolster held between the legs in the tropics to soak up the sweat, not quite a Dutch wife. 'The pillow will comfort you in the long unbroken hours. If you sleep you will unconsciously benefit from its presence. If you wake the bed will seem less large and lonely.' Who writes these books? Do they really think, those quite concerned counsellors, that two feet of linen-bound stuffing will assuage a broken heart? I don't want a pillow, I want your moving breathing flesh. I want you to hold my hand in the dark, I want to roll on to you and push myself into you. When I turn in the night the bed is continent-broad. There is endless white space where you won't be. I travel it inch by inch but you're not there. It's not a game, you're not going to leap out and surprise me. The bed is empty. I'm in it but the bed is empty." (Jeanette Winterson)