4 notes"You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events. from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst."
— If on a winter’s night a traveller, Italo Calvino
2 notes"Time means succession, and succession, change: hence timelessness is bound to disarrange schedules of sentiment. We give advice to widower. He has been married twice: he meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both jealous of one another. Time means growth. And growth means nothing in Elysian life."
— Pale Fire, Nabokov
3 notes"For we die every day; oblivion thrives not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, and our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files."
— Pale Fire, Nabokov
10 notes"The wonder lingers and the shame remains."
— Pale Fire, Nabokov
8 notes"And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time."
— Pale Fire, Nabokov
2 notes"Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and infinite aftertime: above your head they close like giant winds, and you are dead."
— Pale Fire, Nabokov
5 notes"My God died young. Theolatry I found degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs a God; but was I free? How fully I felt nature glued to me."
— Pale Fire, Nabokov
4 notes"There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it’s worth the price, that’s fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought."
— Tim O’Brien, On The Rainy River
1 note"You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead."
— Tim O’Brien, On The Rainy River
2 notes"Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future."
— Tim O’Brien, On The Rainy River
1 note"If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years."
— Tim O’Brien, On The Rainy River
0 notes"All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit."
— Tim O’Brien, On The Rainy River
0 notes"You think you’re safe, the father thought, but it’s thinking you’re invisible because you closed your eyes."
— “Today Will Be a Quiet Day,” Amy Hempel
4 notes"Demain le noir matin,
Je fermerai la porte
Au nez des années mortes;
J’irai par les chemins.
Je mendierai ma vie
Sur la terre et sur l’onde,
Du vieux au nouveau monde."
— Thomas Pynchon, V.
25 notes"Yes, you must find your dream, then the way becomes easy. But there is no dream that lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one."
— Demian, Hermann Hesse
