“Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.”
― Ethan Hawke, quote from The Hottest State
“It's kind of like this," Decker said: "You wake up in the middle of the night and you're dying for a glass of milk. So you stumble out of bed, stub your toe in the darkness, scream with pain, and limp your way to the refrigerator. You open it up and the light is brilliant. You're saved. Then you fold back the paper container, open up the milk, take a deep breath, and put it to your lips. Only --- yhrch! --- the milk is spoiled. Sure, you're bummed. You fold the thing close and put it back in the fridge. It's dark again. But as you're making your way to your lonely old bed, you think to yourself, Wait a minute, maybe that milk wasn't so bad. And I am still thirsty? So you do an about-face and go back to the fridge. The light warms you up again. You take a sip and yup, it's still spoiled. That, to me, is the fitting metaphor for most every relationship I've ever been in.”
― Ethan Hawke, quote from The Hottest State
“Look, I have no idea what's going on," I said, catching my breath. "I don't like myself either. I don't know what's happening to me. I don't want to tell you to fuck off. But you gotta understand, everything in my life feels different. I just want so badly to know if you like me. And I know how asinine that sounds. If you want me to leave you alone, I will, but sometimes... sometimes you meet somebody and you know that whatever you did before, whatever your life was before, it must have been right... nothing could've been too bad or gone too far wrong because it led you to this person. You're that person. Do you want me to go away?”
― Ethan Hawke, quote from The Hottest State
“I don’t remember waking up that Sunday morning —- perhaps I never slept. Iwas just sitting up in bed watching Sarah sleep. She’d slept naked in my bed but she hadn’t let me have sex with her. I didn’t care. I loved watching her sleep. The light was falling through my window, all over the blue sheets of my old bed, and onto her face. I lifted up the sheets and watched her breasts move with her breath. They seemed to be sleeping themselves.
I hoped that she wouldn’t wake up. I laid the sheet back over her, right up to her chin.
I looked up and out of my room.
I thought, This must be what praying is like.”
― Ethan Hawke, quote from The Hottest State
“I want to want to try to never waste energy degrading someone else. Also, I want to try not to see life as a competition.”
― Ethan Hawke, quote from The Hottest State
“Many people die of thirst but the Irish are born with one.”
― Spike Milligan, quote from Puckoon
“I smirk at her and let my eyes graze over her body."I don't know how to be friends with someone I'm attracted to.”
― Cheryl McIntyre, quote from Before Now
“She was still obliged to leave the house every day, on her usual hunt for food; and especially on days of bad weather she had no other solution but to leave Useppe alone, his own guard, locking him in the room. It was then that Useppe learned to pass time thinking. He would press both fists to his brow and begin to think. What he thought about is not given to us to know; and probably his thoughts were imponderable futilities. But it's a fact that, while he was thinking in this way, the ordinary time of other people was reduced for him almost to zero. In Asia there exists a little creature known as the lesser panda, which looks like something between a squirrel and a teddy bear and lives on the trees in inaccessible mountain forests; and every now and then it comes down to the ground, looking for buds to eat. Of one of these panda it was told that he spent millennia thinking on his own tree, from which he climbed down to the ground every three hundred years. But in reality, the calculation of such periods was relative: in fact, while three hundred years had gone by on earth, on that panda's tree barely ten minutes had passed.”
― Elsa Morante, quote from History
“Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“It was an article of faith to the Romans that they were the most morally upright people in the world. How else was the size of their empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic's greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Roman's concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist they had won their empire purely in self-defense.”
― Tom Holland, quote from Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
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