“She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Parents are temporary custodians, keeping watch and offering love and trying to leave the child better than they found him.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“She was open to love, but she was best at managing her own happiness; it was other people’s happiness that sunk her.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Everyone’s always on the hunt for a mirror. It’s basic psychology. You want to see yourself reflected in others. Others—your sister, your parents—they want to look at you and see themselves. They want you to be a flattering reflection of them—and vice-versa. It’s normal. I suppose it’s really normal if you’re a twin. But being somebody else’s mirror? That is not your job.” Nora”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“She believed in second chances, sometimes more than first chances, which were wasted on youth and indiscretion.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn't rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“His love for her was quiet and constant, familiar and soothing; it was almost its own thing entirely, like a worn rock or a set of worry beads, something he’d pick up and weigh in his palm occasionally, more comforting than dispiriting.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“True patriotism, Jack believed, would have been for his fellow Americans to look inward after 9/11 and accept a little blame, admit the attacks had happened, in part, because of who they were in the world, not in spite of it.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“People abandoned one another constantly without performing the courtesy of of actually disappearing. They left, but didn't, lurking about, a constant reminder of what could or should have been.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“It's not your job to be anyone's mirror.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“People might not change but their incentives could.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Everyone’s always on the hunt for a mirror. It’s basic psychology. You want to see yourself reflected in others.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“I you want people to judge you based on the inside, don't distract them from the outside.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Nothing was a sure thing; every choice was just an educated guess, or a leap into a mysterious abyss. People might not change but their incentives could. So”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“a long, boozy evening when her ebullience was so uncorrupted that she could shift a room’s atmosphere”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“I hate wearing flats,” she said, tugging her fitted white blouse a little lower. “They make me feel flat all over.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“So the first time she and Leo combusted, she'd practically been poised for the breakup. In some inexplicable way, she'd been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn't there something nearly lovely–when you were young enough–about guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse? She recognized the undeniable satisfaction of the first emotional fissure because an unraveling was still something grown-up and, therefore, life affirming. See? The broken heart signalled. I loved enough to lose; I felt enough to weep. Because when you were young enough, the stakes of love were so very small, nearly insignificant. How tragic could a breakup be when it was part of the fabric of expectation from the beginning? The hackneyed fights, the late-night phone calls, the indignant recounting for friends over multiple drinks and in earshot of an appropriately flirtatious bartender–it was theatre for a certain type of person . . . Until it wasn't.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“abundance proffered too soon led to lassitude and indolence, a wandering dissatisfaction.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Accommodation. A different and sturdier kind of nest. AS”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“They’d fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It’s addicts stayed addicts.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Leo was the only one who had never petitioned Francie for a loan using The Nest as collateral. Jack and Melody and Bea had all asked at one time that she consider an earlier dispersal, but she stubbornly refused.Until Leo’s accident.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“I’m curious,” he said, “is telling someone to relax ever helpful? It’s like saying ‘breathe’ to someone who is hyperventilating or ‘swallow’ to a person who’s choking. It’s a completely useless admonition.” “I”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn’t rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt. “You’re”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Sometimes a small change could make all the difference.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out … Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“If you want to predict a person’s behavior, identify his or her incentives. Leo”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“The shelf held nothing of value and it held everything of value. It was the past they’d both endured and escaped. It was despair and hope. It was life and death.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
“Being somebody's looking glass is not your job.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, quote from The Nest
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
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“Nothing in all the vast universe can come to pass otherwise than God has eternally purposed. Here is a foundation of faith. Here is a resting place for the intellect. Here is an anchor for the soul, both sure and steadfast. It is not blind fate, unbridled evil, man or Devil, but the Lord Almighty who is ruling the world, ruling it according to His own good pleasure and for His own eternal glory.”
― Arthur W. Pink, quote from The Sovereignty of God
“Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
“We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”
― Terence McKenna, quote from Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
“He looks at you like you’re the key to his soul and like he wants to devour you.”
― quote from A Beautiful Lie
“Perhaps I don't know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don't know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways-everything, ideas included. If I make an effort to find any difference in them, each of them is the same today as it was yesterday, but as soon as I shut my eyes they're suddenly transformed, in a different light. Perhaps I went wrong about the imaginary numbers. If I get to them by going straight along inside mathematics, so to speak, they seem quite natural. It's only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it. But I wasn't wrong about Basini. I wasn't wrong when I couldn't turn my ear away from the faint trickling sound in the high wall or my eye from the silent, swirling dust going up in the beam of light from a lamp. No, I wasn't wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I-I don't mean it literally-it's not that things are alive, it's not that Basini seemed to have two faces-it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There's something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can't measure out with thoughts, a sort of life that can't be expressed in words and which is my life, all the same.
“That silent life oppressed me, harassed me. Something kept on making me stare at it. I was tormented by the fear that our whole life might be like that and that I was only finding it out here and there, in bits and pieces. . . . Oh, I was dreadfully afraid! I was out of my mind.. .”
These words and these figures of speech, which were far beyond what was appropriate to Törless's age, flowed easily and naturally from his lips in this state of vast excitement he was in, in this moment of almost poetic inspiration. Then he lowered his voice and, as though moved by his own suffering, he added:
“Now it's all over. I know now I was wrong after all. I'm not afraid of anything any more. I know that things are just things and will probably always be so. And I shall probably go on for ever seeing them sometimes this way and sometimes that, sometimes with the eyes of reason, and sometimes with those other eyes. . . . And I shan't ever try again to compare one with the other. .”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless
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Shopaholic and Siste...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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