Quotes

Some of my favourite quotes from the books I read!

My point is that every person on this earth is so complicated, Bob, we’re all so complicated, and we match up for a moment—or maybe a lifetime—with somebody because we feel that we are connected to them. And we are. But we’re not in a certain way, because nobody can go into the crevices of another’s mind, even the person can’t go into the crevices of their own mind, and we live—all of us—as though we can. And I respect that, Bob, I do.

Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything

They look down and they understand why it’s called Mother Earth. They all feel it from time to time. They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children. In their clean-shaven androgynous bobbing, their regulation shorts and spoonable food, the juice drunk through straws, the birthday bunting, the early nights, the enforced innocence of dutiful days, they all have moments up here of a sudden obliteration of their astronaut selves and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness. Their towering parent ever-present through the dome of glass.

Samantha Harvey, Orbital

I distrust dreams. It’s just your brain re-stirring information uselessly, fending for itself in another dimension, making movies of its own fears and you wake up horrified or calmed by something that never happened or dissatisfied and you go back down for more which is all you get. Dreaming is like getting drunk alone, the less you live the more you dream, the more fantastic and outrageous the dreams get. I bet that’s all that dead people do, dream endlessly, and dreams are death in training. It would be different say when you wake up terrified and there’s someone there and you tell them the bad one. Dreams in movies and dreams in books are cheats—either made up ones where the writer is too cowardly to tell the story she means or else she has had this dream and thinks it is important to tell everyone about it when really the only person who really cares is one lying next to you in bed.

Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls