Thursday, July 7




I don’t like it when someone tells me something about myself that I haven’t yet realized. If I lack the courage to tell myself something revealing, I’m not ready to hear it from someone else. 
— JILL A. DAVIS, ASK AGAIN LATER 




“Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she’d lost something more tangible, if indefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless

“One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.”
— Nick Hornby, 31 Songs

“Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.”
Truman Capote, Summer Crossing









“I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.” — Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“‘We’re creating little hedonists,’ Frank used to say. ‘Nothing will be as pleasurable as this for the rest of their lives. They’ll search everywhere for something that can measure up, and nothing will.’”
— Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes.


 I am the happiest man alive.”


Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer








“She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.”
— Richard Russo, Mohawk
“You decide for yourself when it will hurt.”
Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses





“When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck.”
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“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