Convincing You to Read 6 Novels Through Quotes
"This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature."
I saw someone else do it recently and thought that it was a brilliant idea. I would never be able to name a favourite novel. I would probably not be able to name even top fifty favourite novels, so here are six in no particular order of favouritness. Yes, I know it’s not a word.
Here we go.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
“What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?'
'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly.
'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.’
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does.
We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.
Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.
Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.
But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.
We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.
She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.
She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
You are your best thing.
Something that is loved is never lost.
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.
He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘
‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.’
He wants to put his story next to hers.
Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
To start with, look at all the books.
She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.
Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her--a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special--and that part of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence.
People don't save other people. People save themselves.
The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.
Enjoy!
