Garth Stein · 304 pages
Rating: (4.9K votes)
“There is no dishonor in losing the race,” Don said. “There is only dishonor in not racing because you are afraid to lose.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“Yet for every peak there is a valley.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“the race is long—to finish first, first you must finish.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“We had come so close to greatness. We had smelled it, and it smelled like roast pig. Everybody likes the smell of roast pig. But what is worse, smelling the roast and not feasting, or not smelling the roast at all?”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“But I totally understood that what filled us with energy could be irritating to someone else,”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“To remember is to leave the present.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“Here’s why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never change the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another’s conversations constantly. It’s like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“We are the creators of our own destiny.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“Your car goes where your eyes go. Simply another way of saying that you make your own destiny.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“We all play by the same rules. But some people spend more time reading those rules and figuring out how to make them work in their behalf.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“But I wondered why they had waited for Eve’s illness to make themselves available for companionship.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.” —”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“We are the creators of our own destiny,”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“Knowing that another path might have been easier for him to travel, but that it couldn’t possibly have offered a more satisfying conclusion.”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
“being alone is not the same as being lonely?”
― Garth Stein, quote from Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog
Garth Stein
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“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)
It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, quote from The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
“Jack was mesmerized by the sight of her, naked in front of those mirrors. He hadn’t really seen her like that. He’d seen her naked, of course, but lying down or standing almost a foot shorter than he as they showered. Now he bent, looked at her profile and said, “My God, Melinda. You’re huge.” She threw him a look that suggested a different choice of words. “I mean, you look awesome, Mel. Look at that!” “Shut up, Jack,” she said. When”
― Robyn Carr, quote from Shelter Mountain
“But since Sloth I've been so monogamous I make the demonstration banana that AIDS educators use to show how to put on a condom, look slutty.”
― Lauren Beukes, quote from Zoo City
“How women defeat one another; how need defeats women.”
― Robin Oliveira, quote from My Name is Mary Sutter
“Do you want to just fuck me in front of all your friends? Because all you seem to be doing is fucking me over Ramsey.”
― K.A. Linde, quote from Avoiding Responsibility
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