It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.
—The Zahir, Paulo Coelho
That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love—that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, is this the same person I lost?
—Amy Tan, “The Kitchen God’s Wife”
I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
—The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.
—Sandra Cisneros, “The House on Mango Street”
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic…. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.
—Diane Setterfield. The Thirteenth Tale. Obscure profound quote of the day. Sweet, sweet eloquence. (via deaddovedonoteat53)
(via fuckyeahreading)
Angry, and half in love with you, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul…Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
I’ve got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?
—“Cat on a Tin Roof”, Tennessee Williams
Bran thought about it. ‘Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?’
‘That is the only time a man can be brave,’ his father told him.
—George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
I want you and you are not here. I pause
in this garden, breathing the colour thought is
before language into still air. Even your name
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again
and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight
I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer
than the words I have you say you said before. Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me
with a look, standing here whilst cool late light
dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,
but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,
inventing love, until the calls of nightjars
interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,
into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.
—Carol Ann Duffy, Miles Away
