“It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.”
― Robert Silverberg, quote from Dying Inside
“I'm an urban New Yorker to the last molecule.”
― Robert Silverberg, quote from Dying Inside
“I don't understand why anybody old enough to know the score ever gets married, anyway. Why should love require a contract? Why put yourself into the clutches of the state and give it power over you? Why invite lawyers to fuck around with your assets? Marriage is for the immature and the insecure and the ignorant. We who see through such institutions should be content to live together without legal coercion”
― Robert Silverberg, quote from Dying Inside
“Kafamda bir sessizlik yuvarı büyüyor, genişledikçe genişleyip bütün kafatasımı kaplayarak kocaman, bomboş bir alan yaratıyor. Yavaş ilerleyen bir gerçeklik sızıntısından muzdaribim. Şeylerin sadece sınırlarını görüyorum, özlerini değil, üstelik sınırlar bile belirsizleşiyor artık.”
― Robert Silverberg, quote from Dying Inside
“I tried to be good to Judith, I tried to be kind and loving, but our hatred kept coming between us.”
― Robert Silverberg, quote from Dying Inside
“He often has followed current fads and modes in an attempt to affiliate himself more firmly with the structures of contemporary existence.”
― Robert Silverberg, quote from Dying Inside
“Wie ich höre, zeigt auch der Himmel eine Leidenschaft für das Neue. Ein Stern wird müde, ein Stern zu sein, und er explodiert und wird eine Nova.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, quote from Shosha
“There are some stories that you don't tell aloud, that you make up and tell silently to yourself.”
― Susan Fletcher, quote from Shadow Spinner
“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)
It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, quote from The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
“A little while later Jack walked into the kitchen at the bar and saw Preacher scowl his greeting. Bravely, Jack walked up to the counter. “Hey, man,” he said. “You were
right, I was wrong, and I’d like us to get back on the same team.”
“You sure this team of mine isn’t too much trouble for little you?” Preacher asked.
“Okay, you about done? Because this really hurts and I’m trying not to deck you right
now.”
― Robyn Carr, quote from Shelter Mountain
“But I really wanted to believe that there were these magic celestial bodies that would direct my life, tell me what to do, and it turns out it's not stars, it's some bits of screwy DNA. I'm just meat with faulty programming.”
― Lauren Beukes, quote from Zoo City
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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