The grottiness and expense of London began to get to her; she got tired of gorging on the canapés at literary launches in order to scrimp on groceries, tired of the fuggy smell of cigarettes ground into the red-and-maroon carpeting of pubs, tired of the pipes bursting every time it froze in winter, and of …
As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same. …
Continue reading Maybe You Should Talk to Someone – Lori Gottlieb – Quotes
I recalled that in high school drama classes we would sometimes play games of “focus”, in which the winner was the girl who could lie on the floor and stare at one place on the ceiling without giving in to the distractions of the other girls pulling faces and whispering dirty jokes above her. I …
Short and sweet like a short story, here are a few quotes from Jigs&Reels by Joanne Harris A change of costume here, of location there: stories do not die, but are simply reincarnated every generation or so into a different time and idiom - from Fule’s Gold I cried at the unfairness of it all: …
Not to fear rethinking the world is the power of science Individual objects are the way in which they interact. If there was an object that had no interactions, no effect upon anything, emitted no light, attracted nothing and repelled nothing, was not touched and had no smell… it would be as good as non-existent. …
From Drive My Car: He wasn’t good at small talk. While he didn’t dislike talking to people he knew well about things that mattered, he otherwise preferred to remain silent. From Yesterday: Because in the final analysis, the language we speak constitutes who we are as people From An Independent Organ: The deep sense of …
Continue reading Men Without Women: Stories – Haruki Murakami – Quotes
From introduction by Sheila Heti: How many writers today would dare to write as Carrington does? Everyone tries to make so much sense - not only to themselves, but to others, especially. I don't know if she was trying to make sense also to her Surrealist friends, but I know that sense was low on …
Continue reading The Debutante and Other Stories – Leonora Carrington – Quotes
It wasn’t really about the engineering of the space, the real battle was about the culture — about changing the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, of changing their minds about who their streets were for. If building roads actually resulted in less traffic, then surely after sixty years of interstate highway construction we would …
Rain is an agony here. In other parts of the world, a downpour will in all likelihood come as a boon for nearly everyone and everything – good for the crops, good for the fauna and the flora, and with an extra splash of romanticism, good for lovers. Not so in Istanbul though. Rain, for …
Continue reading The Bastard of Istanbul – Elif Shafak – Quotes
Saturday was no breeze for Megan, either. She woke up and immediately felt embarrassed. That nasty, awful, hollow endless embarrassment that was becoming her life. Randy was still asleep. She lay there, wishing she could be unconscious again. If she got up and out of bed, what would there be to do? "Yeah, I guess …
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