“Fuck the world. Do what you feel is right, and you have every right to love whomever you want.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“I’m talking about the kind of indignity that changes you as a person, makes you withdraw, hide from the world because suddenly it’s turned into something frightening—full of dark corners and monsters.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“It was decided. I was going to let Ryan Foster do me. I had no idea when it would happen, but it was inevitable. If he kept being this cute, it was inevitable.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“I realized I needed to look at evil in an entirely new light. Most bad guys weren’t running around with eyes bugged out. Most bad guys didn’t come across freaky and frightening…Most bad guys were normal, everyday guys moving through life like anyone else… They were hard to spot and that’s what made them so good at being bad… They could get away with it, and they knew it.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“It’s always described as melting, and I finally understood why. I thought my body was turning to liquid. I could feel my bones giving way, threatening to dissolve and leave me one big puddle of goo.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“Ryan chuckled. “You’re going to be my trouble this year, aren't you?” he asked softly. Hell yeah I was.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“I don't know. It's the world we live in, I guess. Some things will never be fair.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“I thought if I stared a little longer I could see right inside his head, to his brain, and I don’t know why that turned me on so much. I wanted to witness the workings of his mind, the firing synapses, information traveling safely inside neurons to different parts of his body. A few made it to his hand, and they must have told him to keep holding mine because he didn’t let go.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“People take advantage of good people. That's what I mean. So don't be a sucker.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“How can he not have any friends? He's so cute.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“Brooke, why don't we talk about you instead? You seem much more interesting." I started feeling frustrated. "I'm sure that's not true. Why are you so mysterious?”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“Ryan, when did you get a girlfriend?" his sister asked.
"She's not my girlfriend, Kaylen," Ryan replied. "Go away.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“The first contact of brush on canvas is a heady thing. I think it's the promise of something wonderful, beautiful. You can see the finished product in you mind's eye, nt it never turns out quite as you expect. It's always better, or at least that's been my experience. And that's where the headiness comes in. You think you know what to expect. You think you have it all planned out. But something in you always surprises you, and it's buzzing undercurrent that keeps you silently guessing until your picture is complete.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“The first contact of brush on canvas is a heady thing. I think it’s the promise of something wonderful, beautiful. You can see the finished product in your mind’s eye, but it never turns out quite as you expect. It’s always better, or at least that’s been my experience. And that’s where the headiness comes in. You think you know what to expect. You think you have it all planned out. But something in you always surprises you, and it’s a buzzing undercurrent that keeps you silently guessing until your picture is complete.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“Oil paints were wiser to the human condition, understanding our imperfections and giving us enough time to rework ourselves until we made things right.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“-when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-framed internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt's case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage I bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful--what else could explain the fact that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact that thy themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from Oblivion
“Why do I think these particular books have been popular? Two reasons. First, I think it is because they involve no harsh, garish violence at all. They involve game playing, really. No one is burned or cut or hurt. Certainly no one is killed. Indeed the whole sadomasochistic predicament is presented as a glorified game played out in luxurious rooms and with very attractive people, and involving very attractive slaves. There are endless motifs offered for dominance and submission, for surrender and love. It’s like a theme park of dominance and submission, a place to go to enjoy the fantasy of being overpowered by a beautiful man or woman and delightfully compelled to surrender and feel keening pleasure, without the slightest serious harm. I think it’s authentic to the way many who share this kind of fantasy really feel. I think what makes it work for people is the combination of the very graphic and unsparing sexual details mixed with the elegant fairy-tale world. Unfortunately a lot of hackwork pornography is written by those who don’t share the fantasy, and they slip into hideous violence and ugliness, thinking the market wants all that, when the market never really did. Second, this is shamelessly erotic. It pulls no punches at being what it is. It’s excessive and it is erotica. Before these books, a lot of women read what were called “women’s romances” where they had to mark the few “hot pages” in the book. I said, well, look, try this. Maybe this is what you really want, and you don’t have to mark the hot pages because every page is hot. Every page is about sexual fulfillment. Every page is meant to give you pleasure. There are no boring parts. Yet it’s very “romantic.” And well, I think this worked.”
― quote from The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
“That is the fantastic intolerable paradox of my life, that I have gone questing for what I possessed initially -- a belief to invest my days with dignity and meaning, a pattern of behavior through which man might most articulately express his devotion to his fellows.”
― quote from As a Driven Leaf
“Kepler's laws, although not rigidly true, are sufficiently near to the truth to have led to the discovery of the law of attraction of the bodies of the solar system. The deviation from complete accuracy is due to the facts, that the planets are not of inappreciable mass, that, in consequence, they disturb each other's orbits about the Sun, and, by their action on the Sun itself, cause the periodic time of each to be shorter than if the Sun were a fixed body, in the subduplicate ratio of the mass of the Sun to the sum of the masses of the Sun and Planet; these errors are appreciable although very small, since the mass of the largest of the planets, Jupiter, is less than 1/1000th of the Sun's mass.”
― Isaac Newton, quote from The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
“Power has been called many things. The ultimate aphrodisiac. An absolute corrupter. A mistress. A violin. But its true nature remains elusive. After all, a head of state wields a very different sort of power than”
― S. Hussain Zaidi, quote from Dongri To Dubai : Six Decades of The Mumbai Mafia
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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