“There was this girl,” I said. "l mean-” All of a sudden I felt flustered, and added, ”We were just friends.”
”No such thing.”
”We were.”
”Look. Despite what you may have heard, people have sex all the time with people they don't love, or particulary care about, or sometimes can't even stand. So why in the world do people say that it's just friends, like it doesn't mean as much, if you're not having sex? Real friendship is true and forever and with all your heart. It's not Relationship Lite.”
― quote from A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
“We'd been twelve years old together. We'd shared the convictions that only twelve year olds can share, that love is simple and powerful and easy and inevitable.”
― quote from A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
“I sat there in the darkness, with their skin clsoe to me, and I felt lifted up and wrapped with kindness. And very small, because I didn't deserve this, but small the way a mouse in its den is small: warm and safe and protected.”
― quote from A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
“Didn't anyone ever teach you that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission?”
― quote from A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
“Not Pining," she admitted. "But I look at you and you're so...Awkward, and scruffy, and fearless, and just so intensely yourself, and I remember why I fell so hard for you. And in another universe, who knows?”
― quote from A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
“Poems are not for explaining," she said, her tone as bored and faintly scornful as his. "They are for pretty girls to read aloud. Everyone knows that.”
― quote from A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
“I had always been blithely convinced that if I followed the side roads for long enough I’d trip over something wonderful, that thing you never know you’re looking for until you land on it that suddenly makes the universe a much bigger place than it ever had been before.”
― quote from A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
“I didn’t believe that God told some guy, however many thousands of years ago, “Hey, build a ginormous boat in this desert over here.” I liked it as a story, though, because it seemed like the kind of thing God ought to say. There were crazy stupid things that needed to get done, or should have gotten done, or turned out to be wonderful when they did get done. And maybe, if God ever did tell people what to do, it was to stick up for these crazy stupid things that no one in their right mind would ever do otherwise.”
― quote from A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
“For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree.
For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket.”
― Ernst Jünger, quote from Eumeswil
“I was beloved. I had been hoped for. Somehow, I was necessary.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“I shall freckle."
"That doesn't bother me," he said with a shrug.
"It bothers me!"
"Don't worry. They'll be on your own face, so you won't have to see them."
Ellie gaped at him, astounded by his illogic.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Brighter Than the Sun
“Up to this moment in her life, Audrey had never evinced the slightest sentimentality about children. Insofar as she had recognized them as an independent category of personhood, she had tended to think of them as trainee humans. Inadequate adults. She loved her own daughters well enough - wanted them to be happy and so forth - but they had failed to inspire in her that mad, lioness passion to which other mothers so preeningly testified. She was still in some shock regarding the servility of motherhood - the sheer, thankless drudgery of it. All the cleaning up of messes she had made and preparing meals she did not want to eat. She fed her girls regularly and diligently brushed their teeth twice a day and made sure they were more or less appropriately dressed for the weather, but beyond a dull sense of satisfaction at having fulfilled her maternal duties, she received no pleasure from performing these tasks. Try as she might, she she could not feel her daughters' happiness and sorrows as her own.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from The Believers
“This time of year," she said, "people’s consciences gnaw at them. They give away truckloads of canned goods and quote Dickens and wring their hands over the ‘less fortunate.’" We boarded the Metro and took seats perpendicular to each other. "But God forbid anyone should address why they’re poor in the first place, or try to change the structures that keep them poor. Then the ‘less fortunate’ turn into ‘welfare queens’ and ‘derelicts.’ But if I were a lobbyist whoring on behalf of some transnational corporation, I’d never hear the word ‘derelict.’"
"So when it comes to taking care of poor people," I said, "if Mother Teresa is the Hallmark card, then you’re the electric bill.”
― Jeri Smith-Ready, quote from Requiem for the Devil
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