Real quotes
21.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Incidentally, did you know that the whole eight glasses a day thing is complete bullshit and has no scientific basis? So many things are like that. Everyone just assumes they're true, because people are basically lazy and incurious, which incidentally is one of those words that sounds like it wouldn't be a word but is."
"We're invisible. I've never been here with someone else. It's different being invisible with someone."
"I was so frustrated with him. "I just want to be enough for you, but I never can be. This can never be enough for you. But this is all you get. You get me, and your family, and this world. This is your life. I'm sorry if it sucks. But you're not going to be the first man on Mars, and you're not going to be an NBA star, and you're not going to hunt Nazis."
"The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me. "And my conclusion is," he said, "since I had been in very good terms with Anne, that most parents don't know really their children."
"I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around."
"It always happened like this: he would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say, “Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,” and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come."
"I smiled. She smiled. I believed the smile."
"Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we’re still alone… each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together."
"You had been a paper boy to me all these years - two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real."
"By far the best cure for hangovers is not drinking excessively the night before.This cure has a 100% success rate, and as you save the cost of the drinks you would have otherwise drunk, it is cheaper than free."
"Like everyone, I'm saddened and horrified by this. All I'll say is that I'm personally trying to pay more attention to the victims than to their murderer. I certainly will not be mentioning the murderer. I don't think he warrants our attention-particularly since he so clearly wanted it."
"When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable."
"We have to live with ambiguity. We have to give ourselves over to it. The question is: How? How are we going to live in a universe where important questions will always go unanswered?"
"You can't just make me different and then leave. You can't. You can't change me and make my whole life centered around you, then leave."
"That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us."
"Books are seldom useful unless they are also beautiful."
"Truth defies simplicity."
"Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations."
"...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent."
"One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?" - that's not the question you're asking. The question you're asking is, "do you like me right now.""
