Quotes

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Are two types of jokes. One sort goes on being funny forever. Other sort is funny once. Second time it’s dull. This joke is second sort. Use it once, you’re a wit. Use twice, you’re a halfwit. —Robert Heinlein

Birdy

I don’t know how long I was dreaming the dream before I began to know. It’s hard to know you’re dreaming unless you catch yourself doing it. —William Wharton

Empire Falls

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect. —Richard Russo

Bring Up the Bodies

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws. —Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall

Grace dies in his arms; she dies easily, as naturally as she was born. He eases her back against the damp sheet: a child of impossible perfection, her fingers uncurling like thin white leaves. I never knew her, he thinks; I never knew I had her. —Hilary Mantel

Stoner

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. —John Williams

Johnny Got His Gun

If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us. They will not be us the guys who grow wheat and turn it into food the guys who make clothes and paper and houses […]

This is Where I Leave you

The thing about people who work in finance is that they consider their job infinitely more important than anything or anyone, and so it’s perfectly legitimate to tell everyone else to fuck off because they have a conference call with Dubai. Billions of dollars are involved, so things like a kid’s birthday or a wife’s […]

Jitterbug Perfume

To physically overcome death—is that not the goal?—we must think unthinkable thoughts and ask unanswerable questions. Yet we must not lose ourselves in abstract vapors of philosophy. Death has his concrete allies, we must enlist ours. Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be […]

The Blind Assassin

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. —Margaret Atwood

History of the Rain

…poets are different to you and me. Poets do not escape into other worlds, they go deeper into this one. —Niall Williams

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. —Richard Flanagan

All the Light We Cannot See

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, […]

Straight Man

Truly grateful people don’t make lists of things to be grateful for, any more than happy people make lists of things to be happy about. Happy people have enough to do just being happy. —Richard Russo

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

He called me Paulie. “Paulie, run and get me a beer from the fridge.” “Paulie, stay awake, now, it’s the sixth inning, Paulie, you gotta watch the game and tell me what happens.” “We lost, Paulie, it’s another loss, goddamn it, that’s how it is with them losing fucks, they lose on you, the fuckers.” […]

Americanah

You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two […]

We Need New Names

And the jobs we worked, Jesus—Jesus—Jesus, the jobs we worked. Low-paying jobs. Backbreaking jobs. Jobs that gnawed at the bones of our dignity, devoured the meat, tongued the marrow. —NoViolet Bulawayo

All the Pretty Horses

Sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh, sweeter for the betrayal. Nesting cranes that stood singlefooted among the cane on the south shore had pulled their slender beaks from their wingpits to watch. Me quieres? she said. Yes, he said. He said her name. God yes, he said. —Cormac McCarthy