“Marcus looked down. “Ah, man! This was my favorite shirt. Who tore it?” he asked, trying to pull the ragged edges together.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“You know,” he said, “P.S.S. Piss Camp.”
“Yeah, I get it,” I said, “It’s just not funny.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“...but I’d learned a long time ago that the worse things are, the more people lie about them.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“Let’s just say, there’s not much of a moon out tonight,” Nose continued anyway, “but if Yale joined us, there would be.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“I know babe" he said, wrapping me in his arms. I could hear the loudly thu-bump of his heart as he picked me up and carried me like a child. And he called me Babe.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“Gone was the insignificant, defective girl. I was some kind of f**king comic book vigilante & it felt amazing! ”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“Don’t think about that. Don’t think about him.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“Instead, I just sat there crying, hoping he’d come find me, which made me cry even harder.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“Los viejos hábitos son difíciles de eliminar.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“Was he just humouring me? Just giving me the illusion of control while he manipulated me into doing what he wanted with his overwhelming proximity?”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
“I have never forgotten, and I can't imagine you have, and I've thought of it over the years. It was so good, when it was good, I kept thinking. How could it go wrong?”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from Dying of the Light
“But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from Berenice
“It is said that marriage is a long war between ancient families trapped in close proximity by lust.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from Freddy and Fredericka
“The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.”
― Henry James, quote from The Bostonians
“Não há salvação. Nem mesmo a embriagez do desespero e a resolução cega, porque tu estás aí, nessa cama, na luz selvagem da tua morte.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
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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