John Dufresne · 336 pages
Rating: (586 votes)
“You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“I told her how I thought you could always revise your life, how you could work and work on it, finesse the details, see if what you're saying is what you wanted to be saying.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“You make allowances for your family. They may not seem normal to the world but they're normal to you because you've been dealing with them all your life.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Every person in therapy has a love disorder.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.”
― John Dufresne, quote from Love Warps the Mind a Little
“But when you suffer with someone, you learn them. And it’s hard to kill a person you’ve learned.”
― Emily Skrutskie, quote from The Abyss Surrounds Us
“This above all: to thine own self be true.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Hamlet: An Authoritative Text, Intellectual Backgrounds, Extracts from the Sources, Essays in Criticism (Norton Critical Edition)
“This is what it means to be a feminist. Not a humanist or an equalist or whatever. But a feminist. It's not a bad word. After today it might be my favorite word. Because really all it is is girls supporting each other and wanting to be treated like human beings in a world that's always finding ways to tell them they're not.”
― Jennifer Mathieu, quote from Moxie
“Every person who is Fountain-blessed demonstrates a remarkable power, and sometimes more than one. They keep their lore secret from the world, except for some general principles that I will speak on. The terms used to describe the two major ways in which they draw in power are “rigor” and “vigor.” The term “rigor” implies severity and strictness. The magic comes through meticulous and persistent adherence to some regimented craft or routine. These individuals are iron-willed and self-disciplined to a degree very uncommon amongst their fellows. The term “vigor” implies effort, energy, and enthusiasm. To do a task out of the love of it, not for ambition’s sake alone. These two concepts mark the twin horses by which the magic of the Fountain can be drawn. Why one individual may prefer one to the other or whether there is difference in the efficacy of these methods remains, to the rest of us, a mystery. —Polidoro Urbino, Court Historian of Kingfountain”
― Jeff Wheeler, quote from The Thief's Daughter
“We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people. When it comes to personal happiness there is a lot that we as individuals can do.” •”
― Dalai Lama XIV, quote from The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World
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