“...quando perdi qualcuno e questo qualcuno ti manca, tu soffri perché la persona assente si è trasformata in un essere immaginario: irreale. Ma il tuo desiderio di lei non è immaginario. Così è a quello che devi aggrapparti: al desiderio. Perché è reale.”
― Jonathan Coe, quote from The House of Sleep
“Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide
In me, no lunar power can reverse;
But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied
A sightlessness tonight: or something worse,
A disregard that made me feel unmanned.
Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath
To think I saw my future traced in sand
One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death,”
And pray for an oblivion so deep
It ends in transformation. Only dawn
Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep
With light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn:
Another lifetime is the least you’ll need, to trace
The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace.”
― Jonathan Coe, quote from The House of Sleep
“There’s a fine line between forgetting an event, and suppressing the memory of it.”
― Jonathan Coe, quote from The House of Sleep
“If there was one kind of hat Terry despised above all others, it was the baseball cap. There was nothing wrong with children wearing it, of course, but whenever he saw it on the head of an adult it seemed to symbolize everything that he most hated about America, even more potently than the figure of Mickey Mouse or the latest Coke adverts or the hordes of giant yellow ‘M’s which were even now beginning to advance across Britain like an unchecked virus. And even worse, Kingsley was wearing it back to front. This, without doubt, was the ultimate badge of imbecility.”
― Jonathan Coe, quote from The House of Sleep
“Don’t you know what a pussy is, sir?’
‘Of course he doesn’t. He hasn’t even seen Basic Instinct.”
― Jonathan Coe, quote from The House of Sleep
“This is the crazed, manic energy of the bull at the end of the fight, fatally wounded but ploughing ahead, driven only by pain and anger and the mindless will to go on living.”
― Jonathan Coe, quote from The House of Sleep
Jonathan Coe
Born place: in Birmingham, The United Kingdom
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“Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road...”
― Irvine Welsh, quote from Trainspotting
“I was born to join in love, not hate - that is my nature.”
― Sophocles, quote from Antigone
“He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken.
Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway.
It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Words of Radiance
“...in that dilated moment after sunset when the sky holds all the light...”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not ro reincarnate her as a woman. "Let me become a cat or dog, but not a woman," was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Digging to America
Barrel Fever: Storie...
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Seeds of Yesterday
The Autograph Man
The Good GuyBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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