“The peculiar striations that define someone’s personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance.”
— Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn’t just naive it’s a vanity.”

— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin 

“‘They’ve grown comfortable with their money,’ I said. ‘They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.’”
— Don DeLillo, White Noise

"Do you hate people?" 

"I don’t hate them… i just feel better when they’re not around."

charles bukowski

“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 I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.”

— Don DeLillo, Underworld

“You’re drunk, and I’m drunk, and I’m just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That’s the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I’ll tell them anything they want to know. Just ask me. Go ahead, ask me.”  — Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That’s an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it’s next door to impossible not to imagine that they’re all waxworks, but probably they’re thinking just the same about you.” 

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

“How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent

the thing that worries me the most is that even if i had someone, the feelings that plague me every day would still be present, in the background and temporarily drowned out or exactly the same, if loneliness is simply the way i am and i cannot rid myself of it, if the feeling of being completely and utterly alone is not dependent on the level of human contact, if it is not a feeling at all, just the human condition, and i am one of the few who cannot learn to live with it.

- all tomorrows parties

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. 

— Anais Nin