“...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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“Do you think we’re like you Americans in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo who torture people by keeping them thirsty? We have something called ra’fateh Islami”—Islamic kindness—“in this prison. Something you Americans have never heard of.” He genuinely believed that calling someone an American was an insult, and always said the word with a sneer.”
― Maziar Bahari, quote from Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival
“You’re all I have left. You’re holding my whole world together, Em.”
― Renee Carlino, quote from Swear on This Life
“If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
“Aunt Mari says that the assholes in our lives are our biggest blessings."
"How so?"
"Without them, we'd take the ones who aren't for granted. Assholes give us needed perspective to appreciate the people who really love us.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Born of Fury
“I want to open myself up, I want to experience other dimensions, I don’t want to be bound by the rules of this world. Does that make me a freak?”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, quote from Sisterland
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The Life of Charlott...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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