Quotes from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“We are each the love of someone's life.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“People always say the greatest love story in the world is Romeo and Juliet. I don't know. At fourteen, at seventeen, I remember, it takes over your whole life." Alice was worked up now, her face flushed and alive, her hands cutting through the night-blooming air. "You think about nobody, nothing else, you don't eat or sleep, you just think about this . . . it's overwhelming. I know, I remember. But is it love? Like how you have cheap brandy when you're young and you think it's marvelous, just so elegant, and you don't know, you don't know anything . . . because, you've never tasted anything better. You're fourteen."

It was no time for lying. "I think it's love"

You do?"

I think maybe it's the only true love."

She was about to say something, and stopped herself. I'd surprised her, I suppose. "How sad if you're right," she said, closing her eyes for a moment. "Because we never end up with them. How sad and stupid if that's how it works.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window...”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“years; they had exchanged just one letter, one glance in”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli

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“After this interlude we return to the question of the parcel. Yes, says the Postmaster, it has been here – actually here in the office! But it is here no longer. It has been removed to the custody of the Customs. Monsieur B. must realize that parcels are subject to Customs dues. B. says that it is personal wearing apparel. The Postmaster says: ‘No doubt, no doubt; but that is the affair of the Customs.’ ‘We must, then, go to the Customs office?’ ‘That will be the proper procedure,’ agrees the Postmaster. ‘Not that it will be any use going today. Today is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays the Customs are closed.’ ‘Tomorrow, then?’ ‘Yes, tomorrow the Customs will be open.’ ‘Sorry,’ says B. to Max. ‘I suppose it means I shall have to come in again tomorrow to get my parcel.’ The Postmaster says that certainly Monsieur B. will have to come in tomorrow, but that even tomorrow he will not be able to get his parcel. ‘Why not?’ demands B. ‘Because, after the formalities of the Customs have been settled, the parcel must then go through the Post Office.’ ‘You mean, I shall have to come on here?’ ‘Precisely. And that will not be possible tomorrow, for tomorrow the Post Office will be closed,’ says the Postmaster triumphantly. We go into the subject in detail, but officialdom triumphs at every turn. On no day of the week, apparently, are both the Customs and the Post Office open!”
― quote from Come, Tell Me How You Live

“The truth is, the abyss lives in us. In our greed. In the way we look at things different to us, and see things lesser. In the way we see the smaller, or the weaker, and think them prey.

It begins with the beasts of the land, the birds of the sky. And in a blinking, we find ourselves seeing our lessers in people with different colored skins. Different gods. Different creeds. We see them as lessers, and we hurt, and we kill, and we think nothing of it. Because they are different, we think ourselves just. Because we are stronger, we think ourselves righteous.

That is the abyss in all of us. And we stand close to the edge still. Closer than any can dream. We need but stray for a moment and we will find ourselves back again, staring down into that black. And who will save us? When everything that was different to us is already gone?”
― Jay Kristoff, quote from Endsinger

“The Bible is a whole series of highways, all leading toward God. And when the text has been illuminated and the believer of the text knows that God is the end toward which he is moving, then that man has real faith.”
― A.W. Tozer, quote from The Attributes of God: A Journey Into the Father's Heart

“Polislerin canı cehenneme.güvenimize ihanet ediyorsunuz!
elini bir çocuğun pantolonuna sokan rahiplerin canı cehenneme.
onları koruyan, bizi kötülüğe yönelten kiliselerin canı cehenneme.
konu açılmışken, İsa'nın da canı cehenneme. paçayı ucuz kurtardı.
çarmıhta bir gün, cehennemde hafta sonu boyunca kaldı ve meleklerin ilahileri sonsuza dek onun için söylenecek.
Otisville' de yedi yıl yaşamayı denesene İsa!”
― David Benioff, quote from The 25th Hour

“The world could be a conniving harlot, as evil as a demon, but love would defeat her, every single time. Love never failed.”
― Gena Showalter, quote from Burning Dawn

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