Thursday, May 26





“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath




"I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?"
Jonathan Safran Foer

"Certain people you just can’t trust, you know Luke? Never trust anyone who doesn’t smoke pot or listen to Dylan. Never trust anyone who doesn’t like the beach. Never, ever, ever trust anyone who says they don’t like dogs! You meet someone who doesn’t like dogs you alert the authorities immediately and you sure as shit don’t marry them." Dr. Squires, The Wackness 






To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be. — Anna Louise Stron




“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”
— Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.”
— Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 


“Sometimes it felt like there was a part of me inside him that I ached to get to.”
Lily King, Father of the Rain






She wasn’t ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn’t been convincing. They’d been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.” 
Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder


“I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it’s proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?”
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion


“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden