What would Salinger do?

me Archive Quotes by author J.D. Salinger / Ernest Hemingway / F. Scott Fitzgerald Chuck Palahniuk / Ray Bradbury / Jonathan Tropper Jonathan Safran Foer / Neil Gaiman / John Steinbeck Haruki Murakami / Kurt Vonnegut / Gillian Flynn

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

Just an after-effect, he tells himself, an after-effect of the invasion. In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

They are not hungry but they eat. Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

How could I be feeling a wound in a place where I was not even vulnerable? What did Kay and I care less about than one, money, and two, religion? Our favorite philosopher was Bertrand Russell. Our religion was Dylan Thomas' religion, Truth and Joy! Our children would be atheists. I had only be making a joke!

Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

Really, can they be this blind? Can people be so abysmally stupid and live? Do you believe it? Can they actually be equipped with all the machinery, a brain, a spinal cord, and the four apertures for the ears and eyes—equipment, Mrs. Nimkin, nearly as impressive as color TV—and still go through life without a single clue about the feelings and yearnings of anyone other than themselves?

Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

And it’s true, is it not?-incredible, but apparently true--there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees? Because it wasn’t, you see, that one was the best center fielder imaginable, only that one knew exactly, and down to the smallest particular, how a center fielder should conduct himself. And there are people like that walking the streets of the U.S. of A.? I ask you, why can’t I be one! Why can’t I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field! Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder—and nothing more!

Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

Learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you.

David Foster Wallace, Infinte Jest

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

The bastard wasted nomotion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care. His was a tennis player’s dictum: touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will move or stay still or move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and yield up their innermost seams to you. Teach you all their tricks.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario’s head… And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal was going to be very patient about helping him change.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can’t even bring himself for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

You know how it feels when you're someplace and you ask yourself, Why am I here? That's how it is with me all the time. I can't wait to leave. To go from wherever I am to some other place. It never ends. I swear. I'd have killed myself a long time ago if I wasn't such a pussy.

Etgar Keret, The Girl on the Fridge

[between-grief-and-high-delight]

We're all alone on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest