Walter Van Tilburg Clark · 712 pages
Rating: (56 votes)
“Places, like people, have their beginnings and have also their endings.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quote from The City Of Trembling Leaves
“Nothing imaginative ever happens to five people at once, because each is up to only one-fifth of his personal intelligence and perception. A crowd is never equal to the intelligence of any one of its members.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quote from The City Of Trembling Leaves
“Just being is the main thing. Anything else is extra.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quote from The City Of Trembling Leaves
“It is possible to insult Americans?”
“They are automatically insulted and enraged,” said the young composer. “They form splenetic organizations by the hundreds, and write letters to periodicals and congressmen. They gather in mobs and pay no attention. They hang people without trial and shoot citizens down with machine guns out of passing cars. They will despise you because you do not eat the same things they eat for breakfast. They even apply indifference.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quote from The City Of Trembling Leaves
“Recuerdo que mucha gente pensó que todos los que dejasen de dormir venderían su cama. No pasó; la cama aún tenía muchas funciones en la vida de esa gente: amar, tener sexo, descansar con los ojos abiertos, tumbarse, vivir… Se vendieron más camas que nunca.”
― Albert Espinosa, quote from Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I
“Through them, the story becomes an argument for a better way of seeing, which has always struck me as being one of the novel’s better gifts, something which it is uniquely poised to do, if only because it demands the reader’s imagination, and by doing so affirms our capacity to live beyond the limited means of our private lives. We read not to encounter the Other, but to see ourselves refracted in a different landscape, in a different time, in shoes and clothes that perhaps bear no resemblance to our own.”
― Dinaw Mengestu, quote from All Our Names
“You really don’t care about the scars.”
“I care, because they’re important to you, because I suppose they helped make the Shane I know. But they sure as hell don’t make me think any less of you. And they don’t make me want you any less.”
― Kim Fielding, quote from Rattlesnake
“I'm trying to close the door. I have closed that door. That's why I want to leave," I protested.
"No, honey. That's not deciding, that's running. Just like you did last night when you got scared. Choosing and then living with the consequences, that's what deciding really is.”
― J.D. Horn, quote from The Line
“The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walden and other writings
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