Steven Millhauser · 305 pages
Rating: (784 votes)
“For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? ...We have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“... now and again we would happen to step out of the familiar universe into a sudden sharp shock of sweetly scented air, sudden as spilled perfume, piercing as crystal, dark and sweet as the sound of oboes.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“... it is the purpose of this history to trace not the mere outlines of a life but the inner plan, not the external markings but the secret soul.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
“Still, it’s better to believe that some high purpose guides our steps than to think that nothing matters except our own small miseries and happinesses.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow Puppets
“In my family we've always found the world's air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh
“I meet his eyes. They are deep and almost mesmerizing. Did I say deep before? Yeah, right. That’s not it. They have a pull to them, like currents, like Velcro or something, totally captivating, like when you see a convertible flipped over on the highway and there are body bags and you don’t want to look but you look because you can’t look, because you can’t not look, because you are just riveted and . . .
Stop. Just stop.”
― Carrie Jones, quote from Captivate
“I press my lips to hers with such delicacy; I want her to feel everything she’s ever deserved to feel at the hands of someone else. She deserves to feel beautiful. She deserves to feel important. She deserves to feel cared for. She deserves to feel respected. She deserves to feel like there’s at least one other person in this world who accepts her for exactly who she is.
She deserves to know how I feel, because I feel all of those things. And maybe a little more.”
― Colleen Hoover, quote from Maybe Not
“...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Purple Hibiscus
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