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
John Dufresne
Born place: in The United States
Born date January 30, 1948
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“Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.”
― Rebecca Stead, quote from Liar & Spy
“Unhealthy realities can be constructed out of imaginary occurrences as a coping strategy disguised as wish fulfillment,”
― Jen Frederick, quote from Undeclared
“Believe this, young man," exclaimed Shelgrim, layinga thick powerful forefinger on the table to emphasize his words, "try to believe this - to begin with - that railroads build themselves. Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. Mr. Derrick, does he grow his wheat? The Wheat grows itself. What does he count for? Does he supply the force? What do I count for? Do I build the Railroad? You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men. There is the Wheat, the supply. It must be carried to feed the People. There is the demand. The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them - supply and demand. Men have only little to do in the whole business. Complications may arise, conditions that bear hard on the individual - crush him maybe - but the Wheat will be carried to feed the people as inevitably as it will grow. If you want to fasten the blame of the affair at Los Muertos on any one person, you will make a mistake. Blame conditions, not men.”
― Frank Norris, quote from The Octopus: A Story of California
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from El Principito, El Príncipe feliz y otros cuentos
“Was it love or wasn't it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she didn't even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.”
― Patricia Highsmith, quote from The Price of Salt
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