Janice Galloway · 236 pages
Rating: (1.7K votes)
“You would think there's a natural limit to tears: only so much the body can give at one sitting before it runs dry.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
“No matter how often I think I can't stand it anymore, I always do. There is no alternative. I don't fall, I don't foam at the mouth, faint, collapse or die. It's the same for all of us. You can't get out of the inside of your own head. Something keeps you going. Something always does.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
“No matter how dark the room gets I can always see. It looks emptier when I put the lights on so I don't do it if I can help it. Brightness disagrees with me: it hurts my eyes, wastes electricity and encourages moths, all sorts of things. I sit in the dark for a number of reasons.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
“Needing people yet being afraid of them is wearing me out.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
“It's asking for trouble to listen to music alone.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
“I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
“The phone is an instrument of intrusion into order. It is a threat to control. Just when you think you are alone and safe, the call could come that changes your life. Or someone else's. It makes the same flat, mechanical noise for everyone and gives no clues what's waiting there on the other end of the line. You can never be too careful.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
“God isn't fooled by mercenary goodness I told myself and went back to manic smiling.”
― Janice Galloway, quote from The Trick is to Keep Breathing
“He had made his decision regarding Molly with great care and consideration.”
― Jayne Ann Krentz, quote from Absolutely, Positively
“The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from What's Wrong with the World
“Why then should witless man so much misweene
That nothing is but that which he hath seene?”
― Edmund Spenser, quote from The Faerie Queene
“...the very old men [...] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”
― William Faulkner, quote from A Rose for Emily and Other Stories
“Beautiful things don't ask for attention.”
― James Thurber, quote from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
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