Quotes from The Never List

Koethi Zan ·  303 pages

Rating: (10.8K votes)


“I knew from experience there isn't anything anyone can really say to help you through your grief. You just have to let the pain wash over you over and over again, until the tide of it drifts back and away, slowly and gradually.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List


“Or is it the case that no one gets over anything? Is there really that much pain and suffering continuing right now at this minute, in millions of hearts, in bodies carrying on the burden of existence, trying to smile through tears for fleeting, passing moments here and there-when they can forget what happened to them, maybe even for whole hours at a time? Maybe that's what it is to live.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List


“Fanatics, mystics, and extremists all tended toward irrational and unexpected action.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List


“I realized I had let my own incapacity to recover from my past shrink my world so that it was big enough for only me. It was hitting me now, really for the first time, how being fucked up can turn into a form of narcissism. So that I barely acknowledged that others might need something from me.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List


“I couldn't tell if this was Tracy's attempt at dark humor, or if the world truly did hold more horrors that I hadn't considered. I needed to think about that one later, I decided, and shelved it in some inner recess of my brain.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List



“I would, and I will. You know my theory. Plunge in. Face the fear head-on. Stay on the offense.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List


“Plunge in. Face the fear head-on.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List


“So many times people get carried away by passion, do things they never thought they'd do, and their whole lives change in an instant. Sometimes people are simply insane - mentally ill - and it isn't their fault.”
― Koethi Zan, quote from The Never List


About the author

Koethi Zan
Born place: Opp, Alabama, The United States
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Popular quotes

“Everything comes down to time in the end - to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? Isn't happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn't sadness wishing time back again? Even big things - even mourning a death: aren't you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos - ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that's long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced...Isn't it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”
― Anne Tyler, quote from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant


“Absolute certainty is the greatest of all illusions.”
― Jayne Ann Krentz, quote from Absolutely, Positively


“But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from What's Wrong with the World


“Ah lucklesse babe, borne vnder cruell starre,
And in dead parents balefull ashes bred,
Full litle weenest thou, what sorrowes are
Left thee for portion of thy liuelihed,
Poore Orphane in the wide world scattered,
As budding braunch rent from the natiue tree,
And throwen forth, till it be withered:
Such is the state of men: thus enter wee
Into this life with woe, and end with miseree.”
― Edmund Spenser, quote from The Faerie Queene


“For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the
grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair.”
― William Faulkner, quote from A Rose for Emily and Other Stories


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