“...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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“It is time to venture out of the comforting land of either/or opposites and travel into the uncertain territory of both/and.”
― Diane Schoemperlen, quote from Our Lady of the Lost and Found: A Novel of Mary, Faith, and Friendship
“But how glum he looks now." She threw some daisies at him. Then, after a pause, she added mockingly: "It's hunger, my dear. Good Lord, how dependent men are on food!”
― John Dos Passos, quote from Three Soldiers
“Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.”
― quote from Once a Runner
“Went home briefly to get my halter dress for Hero's party, and Mom was waiting for me at the kitchen table. Either she's psychic, or she totally reads my journal, because I haven't said a word about Ben, but somehow she knows something is up.
She was siting with a tray of peanut butter crackers, milk, and about twenty pamphlets on STDs she got from her friend Connie, a nurse at Kaiser. When she started showing me pictures of genital warts, I put my cracker down and said, 'Mom, is this really necessary?' She said, 'Honey, I just want you to understand the risks.'
'Yeah, thanks. Now I'm so traumatized I won't have sex until I'm a senior citizen.'
She smiled. 'Great. I guess I've done my job then. Do you want a sandwich.”
― Jody Gehrman, quote from Confessions of a Triple Shot Betty
“The sciences have two extremities which meet. The first is the ignorance in which men find themselves at birth. The second is that attained by great souls. They have surveyed whatever man can know, find that they know all, meet in that same ignorance whence they started. It is a clever ignorance, which knows itself. Those among them who, having emerged from the first ignorance, have been unable to achieve the other & have some smattering of this self-satisfied knowledge, pose as experts. The latter do not disturb people, are no more mistaken in their judgments on everything than others. The masses, the skilled, make up the retinue of a nation. The others, who respect it, are equally respected by it.”
― Comte de Lautréamont, quote from Maldoror and the Complete Works
Spellbound
Blood Rites
Anybody Out There?
Death Masks
The Last Letter from...
The Late Mattia Pasc...BookQuoters 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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