C.D. Payne · 512 pages
Rating: (8.8K votes)
“I have found that people who can successfully resist temptation invariably lead depressingly stunted lives.”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“Do you suppose the human race invented boredom to make the prospect of death more palatable?”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“Confession can be good for the soul, but it can exact a heavy toll on friendships.”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“Consider, if you will, the morning boner. What a metaphor of hope and renewal! How can anyone give way to despair when one’s groin greets each day with such a gala spectacle of physical optimism?”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“As much as I think about sex, I can only with extreme difficulty conceive of myself actually performing the act. And here's another thing I wonder about. How could you ever look a girl in the eye after you've had your winkie up her wendell? I mean, doesn't that render normal social conversation impossible? Apparently not.”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“I take it, then, Vijay, you are still a virgin?'
Yes, and I find it extremely galling. When Gandhi was my age he had already been married three years.'
No wonder Gandhi turned out to be a great man. When you get your love life nailed down that early, think of all the time it frees up to devote to Great Ideas.”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“Now I know why women get their ears pierced. Once they've survived this ordeal of mutilation, they can face the discomforts of childbirth with equanimity.”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“I've decided Mom's boyfriends are a lot like U.S. Presidents. You keep thinking they can't get any worse. And then she comes up with a Lance Wescott.”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“Dwayne! Don't be ridiculous. Guy's don't share their girlfriends.'
Why not?'
Because they don't. Men are instinctually competitive. It's so there'll be lots of wars to keep overpopulation in check.”
― C.D. Payne, quote from Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
“It’s in our own interests to look at eternity. Looking at eternity brings us back to ourselves, makes us face ourselves—and what do we see? We see something mortal, we see our ideas, we see our thoughts, we see our attitudes, we see what we want, what we remember—all of this is in time. All of this is going to be taken away; it’s going to vanish, that’s inevitable.”
― Belzebuub, quote from Gazing Into the Eternal
“Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down." - Mrs. Brown”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from The Lacuna
“Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That’s what he gets from rowing. —George Yeoman Pocock”
― Daniel James Brown, quote from The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
“He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in through the dormer windows. All around him dust motes rose and fell, shimmering, quivering in those shafts of roiling light. He found several shelves full of old editions of classical writers and began vaguely browsing, hoping to find a cheap edition of Virgil's Aeneid, which he had only ever read in a borrowed copy. It wasn't really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books--an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone.
And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work--an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.”
― Richard Flanagan, quote from The Narrow Road to the Deep North
“I don’t want to wind up some old woman who talks to her rabbit,” she said to Rabbit,”
― Ann Patchett, quote from The Magician's Assistant
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