“Besides, it doesn't matter if it's real. It never does with dreams. They aren't anything anyway but lifesavers to cling to so you don't drown. Life is an ocean, and most everyone's hanging on to some kind of dream to keep afloat.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Life is spectacular. Forget the dark things. Take a drink and let time wash them away to where ever time washes away to.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Childhood was a fantastic country to live in.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Just remember this- weird's good. Embrace the weird, dude. Enjoy it because it's never going away.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Nothing lasts," she says, and there's a little crack in her voice. "You think it's going to. You think, 'Here's something I can hold on to,' but it always slips away.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Goodbye, I say, goodbye, as I disappear little by little into the middle of the middle of my own spectacular now”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“She's drenched and bedraggled, but I've never loved anyone as much as I love her right now. That's how I know I'll have to give her up.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“It's superb to be out in the early, early morning before the sun comes up. There's this sense of being super-alive. You're in on a secret that all the dull, sleeping people don't know about. Unlike them, you're alert and aware of existing right here in this precise moment between what happened and what's going to happen.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“See, I do have a future to give her after all, just not one that includes me.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“She's different from the girls I'm used to dating. She doesn't get tired of my stories and jokes or expect me to start reading her mind. She doesn't want me to dress better or put highlights in my hair or serious up. I'm not a lifestyle accessory to her. I'm a necessity. I'm the guy that's going to crack open her cocoon. She doesn't need to change me - she needs me to change her. At least until her little butterfly wings get strong enough to fly away.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“We’re not the Faster-than-the-Speed-of-Light Generation anymore. We’re not even the Next-New-Thing Generation. We’re the Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Kids, and we’ve crowded in here to hide from the future and the past. We know what’s up – the future looms straight ahead like a black wrought-iron gate and the past is charging after us like a badass Doberman, only this one doesn’t have any letup in him.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“To hell with tomorrow. To hell with all problems and barriers. Nothing matters but the Spectacular Now.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“You're nothing but a product. And what's this product called? Emptiness, dude, that's what it's called. And for the rest of your life, they sell you over and over, right to the end when they package you one last time and plant you in the ground.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Books seem a little old-fashioned, but hey, I can do old-fashioned if it's good.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“You think, 'Here's something I can hold on to,' but it always slips away.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“It's more like I was daydreaming when the Supreme Being told me what I should do with my life, and it's too late to ask what it was.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“I don't believe in that - the husband and wife having to be just alike. I think it's better if they kind of offset each other. Like if they have these different dimensions they can bring to each other.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“They've drummed the miraculous out of you, but you don't want it to be like that. You want the miraculous. You want everything to still be new.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“That type of dream just kind of wears out with time like a favorite old T-shirt. One day, it's nothing but tatters and all you can do is throw it over on the rag pile with the others.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“She might be the only girl I've ever met who still hasn't learned to sacrifice bodily comfort for fashion's sake.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Have you ever started to wave at someone and then realized they weren’t really waving at you, so you abort and go for a head scratch instead? That’s how I felt.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Finally, she's like, "I know it looks bad right now, but parents are just people. They don't always know what to do. That doesn't mean they don't love you.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Beauty’s all around me right here. It’s not in a textbook. It’s not in an equation. I mean, take the sunlight … The colors flow into your lungs, into your bloodstream. You are the colors.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“it's fine to live in the now. but the best thing about now is that there's another one tomorrow. i'm going to start making them count.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Our whole society's a training ground for addicts.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Besides, I’m not looking to get saved. I’m only going with her because it’s what you do when you’re in a relationship. You know? You slide into the third pew from the front and sit there thinking about how desperate all these people are to feel like something loves them. They’ll believe all kinds of hocus-pocus. But your girlfriend likes it, and you like her, so you do it. It’s called compromise. The only way you’re going to get something to last in this world is to work at it.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“We’re toasting the chlorophyll rising in our bodies, catching the energy from the universe. Nobody’s ever been young like we are right at this moment.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“Maybe Marcus was wrong. Maybe a single person can save the world. I'll bet I could. I could save the whole world - for a night.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“That's how our system works. It's a giant con game. One thing gets old, then you have to buy the next thing that gets old, then the next thing. Our whole society's a training ground for addicts.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“I like you so much," she says between kisses. And I can tell she wants to say love instead of like, not because she really does love me but because she just wants to say it. Of course, she can't, though. Not when I haven't said it first.”
― Tim Tharp, quote from The Spectacular Now
“There was a click of high heels in the hall behind us, and a young woman appeared. She was pretty enough, I suspected, but in the tight black dress, black hose, and with her hair slicked back like that, it was sort of threatening. She gave me a slow, cold look and said, "So. I see that you’re keeping low company after all, Ravenius."
Ever suave, I replied, "Uh. What?"
"’Ah-ree," Thomas said.
I glanced at him.
He put his hand flat on the top of his head and said, "Do this."
I peered at him.
He gave me a look.
I sighed and put my hand on the top of my head.
The girl in the black dress promptly did the same thing and gave me a smile. "Oh, right, sorry. I didn’t realize."
"I will be back in one moment," Thomas said, his accent back. "Personal business."
"Right," she said, "sorry. I figured Ennui had stumbled onto a subplot." She smiled again, then took her hand off the top of her head, reassumed that cold, haughty expression, and stalked clickety-clack back to the bistro.
I watched her go, turned to my brother while we both stood there with our hands flat on top of our heads, elbows sticking out like chicken wings, and said, "What does this mean?"
"We’re out of character," Thomas said.
"Oh," I said. "And not a subplot."
"If we had our hands crossed over our chests," Thomas said, "we’d be invisible."
"I missed dinner," I said. I put my other hand on my stomach. Then, just to prove that I could, I patted my head and rubbed my stomach. "Now I’m out of character—and hungry.”
― Jim Butcher, quote from Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files
“Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly,”
― Herbert Marcuse, quote from One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
“This is a sickness rooted and inherent in the nature of a tyranny: that he that holds it does not trust his friends.”
― Aeschylus, quote from Prometheus Bound
“They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts. NOTES ON METHODOLOGY I began this work because of what I saw as incomplete perceptions, outside of scholarly circles, of what the Great Migration was and how and why it happened, particularly through the eyes of those who experienced it. Because it was so unwieldy and lasted for so long, the movement did not appear to rise to the level of public consciousness that, by any measure, it seemed to deserve. The first question, in my view, had to do with its time frame: what was it, and when precisely did it occur? The Great Migration is often described as a jobs-driven, World War I movement, despite decades of demographic evidence and real-world indicators that it not only continued well into the 1960s but gathered steam with each decade, not ending until the social, political, and economic reasons for the Migration began truly to be addressed in the South in the dragged-out, belated response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second question had to do with where it occurred. The migration from Mississippi to Chicago has been the subject of the most research through the years and has dominated discussion of the phenomenon, in part because of the sheer size of the black influx there and because of the great scholarly interest taken in it by a cadre of social scientists working in Chicago at the start of the Migration. However, from my years as a national correspondent at The New York Times and my early”
― Isabel Wilkerson, quote from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“I woke up with a heart attack just out of my field of vision and with my dick in my hand, saying, I love you I love you I love you over and over...And that my dear sweet love of my life, is how things were without you and I'd done everything I could to keep you from knowing that”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from Dermaphoria
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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