“You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.”
“It was hard to admit that those days were over, but it was hard to admit that any days were over, that the days themselves didn't stretch like pulled taffy and sag to the floor.”
“It was clear that in a past life the detective had been a phone booth beside an empty highway.”
“In the kitchen he ate a pear. It occurred to him that, though he had eaten hundreds of pears in the past, if not thousands, this pear was different from every single one he had ever eaten, wholly unique, and, in fact, as he ate it, he was opening parts of the pear that had never been experienced by anyone, human or animal. When his maxillary incisors pierced the skin, which first protected the fruit as it had against the rain and sun and then yielded to the invasion, he was oxygenating particles that had never even been open to oxygen. The wet fruit and seeds had existed in darkness for their entire lives until he tore them out with his teeth.”
“No domestic dispute between Franny and David had inspired the removal of their wedding rings. She would take hers off at work when she was giving scalp massages. Once she thought she had lost the ring, but she found it in the treatment room on a candleholder David had made for her during a personal failure of a pottery class he had taken the year he lost his job. After she found her ring, she started leaving it at home.”
“He thought of the feeling of receiving oxygen from a mask and the calming sensation it brought, partly because of the concentrated gas but partly too because he could hear his muffled lungs expelling their product within the mask, and it reminded him that he was breathing, that the gas was flowing at all times but most importantly at that moment, a constant and essential truth. His lips and lungs and teeth were witness to the passage of breath.”
“Her body swelled and stilled. There would be a moment when she would breathe for the last time. An exhalation. There would be that moment, her prize of air, her still lake, her sweet boat floating away away, her body warping wood, swale and heavy, a sinking thing. He sat beside her, a helpless observer, his only power in witness, some bleak ability to watch and record the event in his own brain, which sent the order to his lungs to breathe with her while she still breathed, channels rising, sparks of interior electrical connection fading with the mind's fool hope that it could create some kind of measurable response, to provide some worth of warmth. Her body beside his, swell and still. He thought of her still. He thought of holding her absolutely still. He loved, he loved her. He loved her, still.”
“I hate to state the obvious,” said Chico, “but you vomited into that cup after I asked you a question.”
“When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you”
“The thread by which our fate hangs is wearing thin. Not nature, but the “genius of mankind,” has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. This is simply another façon de parler for what John called the “wrath of God.” 735”
“We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.”
“Let no one think of me that I am humble or weak or passive; let them understand I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies, loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.”
“This conversation" - Dez rapped her knuckles against the Formica table- "is over."
"Be careful, Dez," Jimmy stated earnestly.
"And don't sleep with him the first night," Vinny warned. "We know what a slut you can be."
Dez turned to Sal. "Do you have anything to add to this bullshit?"
"Yeah." Sal looked down from the ceiling he'd been staring at. "Based on the structure of this building, if we removed that pillar back there, we could take out this whole block."
Dez sighed.”
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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