“It's the kind of leather seat that pulls you in, begs to to relax against it.”
― Allen Zadoff, quote from Boy Nobody
“You want to come back to the bank vault?” Jack says.
The bank vault. That’s what Jack calls his house.”
― Allen Zadoff, quote from Boy Nobody
“There was some violence a year ago. An important kid got shot during an attempted kidnapping while on spring break in Mexico. The Fortune 500 went security crazy. Now rich kids like Jack need a commando team to take a dump.”
― Allen Zadoff, quote from Boy Nobody
“You think that just because you’re in a politician’s house, you’re seeing the real person? Pretty naive, Ben.”
― Allen Zadoff, quote from Boy Nobody
“Your best kicks ass and takes names,” Jack says, and he punches my shoulder again.”
― Allen Zadoff, quote from Boy Nobody
“I listen as I walk down the hall, measuring off the seconds before she closes the door. With a friend, you might close it right behind them. With someone you’re interested in, you might wait a few seconds before closing. And with someone you’re falling for . . . With someone you’re falling for, you don’t go inside. You wait and watch them go. Just like she’s doing now.”
― Allen Zadoff, quote from Boy Nobody
“I don’t remember Romeo being this pushy with Juliet!”.....He arched his eyebrows meaningfully. “And look at how that worked out for them. My way is better—less death, more orgasms.”
― Tillie Cole, quote from Sweet Home
“... [T]hose who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believe they ought to be, or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards. So in earnest are they that they don't even recognise that being in earnest -is the act-. For certain self-aware people, however, this is not possible: to imagine themselves being themselves, living their own real, authentic, or genuine life, has for them all the aspects of a hallucination.
I realise that what I am describing, people divided in themselves, is said to characterise mental illness and is the absolute opposite of our idea of emotional integration. The whole Western idea of mental health runs in precisely the opposite direction: what is desirable is congruity between your self-consciousness and your natural being. But there are those whose sanity flows from the conscious -separation- of those two things. If there even -is- a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation -- the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate. I'm talking about recognising that one is acutely a performer, rather than swallowing whole the guise of naturalness and pretending that it isn't a performance but you. . . . All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about -my- self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself -- a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required, an ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my repertoire. But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Counterlife
“Man does not have to go farther than his own inner experience of the soul’s contemplation of this spiritual-reality presence to find God and attempt communion with him.”
― Urantia Foundation, quote from The Urantia Book
“It’s important that someone celebrate our existence," she objected amiably. "People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Mirror Dance
“No matter what your reality looks like, you're the girl I'm in love with today, and the same girl I'll be in love with tomorrow and all the days after that. Not just because of who you are, but because of who you were.
It's all part of your story, Em. And I want to be a part of your story, too.”
― Myra McEntire, quote from Hourglass
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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