Quotes from Pure

Andrew Miller ·  346 pages

Rating: (7.3K votes)


“First ambitions are best. We are less brave later.”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure


“The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping.”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure


“Like everyone else in the house, she suffers from dreams.”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure


“She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world's character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard.”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure


“The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes?”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure



“Why are there no handsome priest in Paris? One has no inclination to confess anything to an ugly man.”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure


“I’m going to play,’ says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. ‘A pair of these lads can pump for me.’
‘Is this a time for playing?’ asks Jean Baptiste. Then, ‘You are right. You have never been more so.”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure


“Could he not go to hospital?' asks Jean-Baptiste.
The doctor flares his nostrils. 'Hospitals are very dangerous places. Particularly to one already weakened by illness.”
― Andrew Miller, quote from Pure


About the author

Andrew Miller
Born place: in Bristol, The United Kingdom
Born date January 1, 1960
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“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent...

...Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from Infinite Jest


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