Logging My Insanity

Quotes From Tinkers

“Jesus was the founder of modern business, he quoted. He was the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem. He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world! How are you going to be one of my twelve, Crosby, if you can’t sell, if you are not on fire to sell?”

“The flowers Howard now walked among were the few last heirs to that brief local span of disaster and regeneration and he felt close to the sort of secrets he often caught himself wondering about, the revelations of which he only ever realized he had been in the proximity of after he became conscious of that proximity, and that phenomenon, of becoming conscious, was the very thing that whisked him away, so that any bit of insight or gleaning was available only in retrospect, as a sort of afterglow that remained but that was not accessible through words. He thought, But what about through grass and flowers and light and shadow?”

“Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it?”

“Cease your filibuster against the world God gave you.”

“He seemed to me as old as light and just as diffuse.”

“86,400 seconds in our earthly day, and, furthermore, to do so for eight days at a time, making for a total of 691,200 seconds, or 192 hours.”

“so that this alternating, interdependent series of lives formed a sort of intaglio; the waking day of each shadow was the opposite side of its possessor’s sleep.”

“Everything was almost always obscure. Understanding shone when it did, for no discernable reason, and we were content.”

Quotes From The Lacuna

“Sometimes the past can vanish.”

“Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?”

“Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.”

‘To choose your victim, to prepare everything, to revenge yourself pitilessly. And then to go to sleep.’

“The past is all we know of the future.”

“Biltmore mansion. If you want to pay fifty cents to go look at a million dollars, you can do it any day of the week except Sundays.”

“For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a cloud, the world was lost.”

“Mr. Ford should have thought to put it over here,” she said, “so the passenger could help.” “He knew better. In life’s dampest passages, the driver often has to go it alone.”

“What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won’t even stand close to the blade. I’m one of those. We don’t bend anything.”

“Margaret says I should take up fishing. And I think, an old softie like me? What would I do if I caught one? Apologize?”

“permanent.” “What do you mean?” Suddenly he looked weary. “You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what’s broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it’s broken, you are automatically disqualified.”

“It’s a gift to survive death, isn’t it? It puts us outside the fray. How strange, that I include myself, I wonder now what I mean. What was my childhood disease? Love, I suppose. I was susceptible to contracting great love, suffering the chills and delirium of that pox.”

“It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.”

“Those news men could not make a thing true just by saying so. It’s only living makes life.”

“Given the current climate, I told her, Charles Dickens is wise to be dead already.”

“So I decided to try my hand at making art for the hopeful. Because I wasn’t any good at the other thing, manufacturing hopes for the artful. America was the most hopeful place I’d ever imagined.”

Quotes From The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

“For example, all the iron in your blood which stops you from being anemic was made in a star.”

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”

“And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can’t see the desert because it is not a thing. And this is why I like timetables, because they make sure you don’t get lost in time.”

Quotes From Olive Kitteridge

““To love and be loved is the most important thing in life,” causing Kevin to feel an inward fear that grew and spread through him, as though his very soul were tightening.”

“You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn’t go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.”

“Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can’t stand the blah-blah-blah. And they’d just as soon blah-blah-blah about you when your back is turned.”

“She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as “big bursts” and “little bursts.” Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee’s, let’s say, or the waitress at Dunkin’ Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.”

“What does Suzanne know about a heart that aches so badly at times that a few months ago it almost gave out, gave up altogether?”

“People like to think the younger generation’s job is to steer the world to hell. But it’s never true, is it? They’re hopeful and good—and that’s how it should be.”

“The doctor said quietly, “No, no, this is no good,” but it was the doctor’s body, the sudden way he moved the folders on his desk, the way he moved back from Harmon, that Harmon would always remember. As though he had known what Harmon didn’t know, that lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.”

“Always nice to hear other people’s problems,” Olive and Bunny had agreed in the parking lot, pulling on their sweaters”

“But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.”

“Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life.”

“And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child—that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else’s home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one’s own.”

“Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did.”

“Absolutely foolish. “Bad things happen,” she wanted to say. “Where have you been?”

“It’s just that I’m the kind of person,” Rebecca continued, “that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.”

“They were here, and her body—old, big, sagging—felt straight-out desire for his. That she had not loved Henry this way for many years before he died saddened her enough to make her close her eyes.”

“What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.”

Quotes From Wolff Hall

“He has never told anyone this story. He doesn’t mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past—within reason—but he doesn’t mean to give away pieces of himself.”

“We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later. Ask the virgins of Rome.”

“Try always, the cardinal says, to learn what people wear under their clothes, for it’s not just their skin. Turn the king inside out, and you will find his scaly ancestors: his warm, solid, serpentine flesh.”

“A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”

“Henry,” the archbishop says, “I have seen you promote within your own court and council persons whose principles and morals will hardly bear scrutiny. I have seen you deify your own will and appetite, to the sorrow and scandal of Christian people. I have been loyal to you, to the point of violation of my own conscience. I have done much for you, but now I have done the last thing I will ever do.”

“the whole history of the king’s marriage tells us a child in the womb is not an heir in the cradle.”

“Gregory, it’s all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.”

“this silence of More’s, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More’s dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.”

Quotes From City of Refuge

“And all around him all that defiant laughter and defiant grace that kept them all alive.”

“It was on one of those delicious and heartbreaking nights, when things seemed to be at the peak of what they could be (and the sweetness was sharpened with the tenderest melancholy, always somehow present, that this moment would not last forever), that Annie was conceived.”

“Growing up in a corrupt pestilential backwater has given me invaluable insight into other corrupt pestilential backwaters,” he once famously remarked. “I was made for New Orleans.”

“Growing up in a corrupt pestilential backwater has given me invaluable insight into other corrupt pestilential backwaters,” he once famously remarked. “I was made for New Orleans.”

“An epic story, unfolding in real time, does not come along all that often, and when it does the fascination of it is absolute. Like white blood cells streaming toward an infection, broadcasters, print journalists, photographers, bloggers, flooded into New Orleans and began pumping out information, filtered and unfiltered. The news media’s attempts to piece together birds’ nests of sense and coherence out of the twigs and scraps and shards of disconnected information was itself a drama.”

“He had everything he needed to live except a life.”

Quotes From The Book Thief

“Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children.”

“THE ONLY THING WORSE THANA BOY WHO HATES YOU A boy who loves you.”

“It was one of those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at hand, but the night who had blocked the way.”

“The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.”

Quotes From The Lazarus Project

“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.”

“been life before this. Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.”

“That’s why she liked reading; she liked to learn new things; she had read many books. In fact, she liked reading more than sex, she said, and winked, demanding my complicity.”

“All fears are memories of other fears,”

“little Mujo asks his mother where children come from, and she says: Well, I put a little bit of sugar under the carpet before I went to sleep and the following morning I found you there. Little Mujo puts a little bit of sugar under the carpet before he goes to sleep. The following morning he finds a cockroach and says: You motherfucker, if you weren’t my brother, I’d smash you flat.”

“My dreams were but a means of forgetting, they were the branches tied to the galloping horses of our days, the emptying of the garbage so that tomorrow—assuming there would be a tomorrow—could be filled up with new life. You die, you forget, you wake up new.”

“if you can’t go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world—indeed, nowhere is the world.”

“We were like everybody else, because there was nobody like us.”

“Home is where somebody notices your absence.”

Quotes From This Boy’s Life: A Memoir

“I not only carried newspapers, I read them, and reading them had taught me that you can kill a man and get away with it.”

“my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.”

“WHEN WE ARE green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.”

Quotes From After Dark

“What I want to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.”

“Tell you the truth, I’ve had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That’s all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel.”