Helen Hooven Santmyer · 1184 pages
Rating: (11.3K votes)
“In a way, looking back, it seemed a long, long time since she had been eighteen, but in another way her memories were so clear and vivid that it seemed like yesterday. Time was an accordion, all the air squeezed out of it as you grew old. And how strange that in your mind you did not feel any older. You were the same person, but where had the years gone?”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“But surely, if you trust God, you can believe the bad moments pass, and the good memories are worth enough.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“She was moved to a profound but pleasurable melancholy by the evidence that human life is brief and long survived by the material things it had believed itself to possess.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“But Calvinists have never been pacifists: they have always been all too ready for a fight.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“When we get presidents with brains it's purely by accident. Who was ever selected for his brains? We choose them for other qualities, or because they can be elected.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“Who are you all going to gossip about once the
celebrities leave town? You’ll need to find someone else to talk about.” I couldn’t help but laugh.
“We’ll just talk about you, Tar. We’ll sit around and reminisce about how much fun you used to be
while using the cobwebs growing between your legs to knit hats for the poor!”
― Tina Reber, quote from Love Unscripted
“It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway of the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart, --
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.”
― Dorothy Parker, quote from The Portable Dorothy Parker
“I don’t care what color your hair is, if you’re pale or tan, if you have makeup on or just woke up all I care about is that when I look at you, you always look back and see me. You’re beautiful inside and out and if you wanted to tattoo all that pretty white skin from head to toe I would be honored to put it there for you but if not I’ll take you all smooth and milky white any chance I get.”
― Jay Crownover, quote from Rule
“Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana? Try to imagine this: You're a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it's directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That's hysteria siberiana.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from South of the Border, West of the Sun
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