Manda's Book Corner

Quotes I like from whatever I am reading... therefore updated sporadically Goodreads Instagram: americanroseembroidery *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Author Index

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When we are living in a fairy-tale we are not aware of it; in memory alone do we discover its magic.

- Raymond Radiguet, Count D'Orgel's Ball

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I lived with one great idea, with a dream, a lie in which we all begin to believe, sooner or later.

- Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin

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Ah, awful weight! Infinity

Pressed down upon the finite Me!

- Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence

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But I felt as though I'd fallen into a Charlie Chaplin film—a tragic world in which I was isolated, different from others, and unable to communicate.

- Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue

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Because she's such a perfect creature and I'm such an imperfect one. Perfect creatures have the most perfect way of ruining the imperfect ones.

- Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

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And to him, she was so sweet, she was such bliss of release, that he would have suffered a whole eternity of torture rather than forego one second of this pang of unsurpassable bliss.

- D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

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If there weren't you in the world, then I shouldn't be in the world, either.

- D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

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This was no actual world, it was the dream-world of one's childhood—a great circumscribed reminiscence. The world had become unreal. She herself was a strange, transcendent reality.

- D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

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She had a childish belief in the miraculous power of strange scenes and new faces to transform her life and wipe out bitter memories.

- Summer, Edith Wharton

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For a moment she found this prospect terrifying—that memory was not a well-kept library, but rather a moth-eaten basement with dim, flickering lights—but remembered then that this was just how everyone lived all the time; how she herself had lived most of her life. You groped around in the dark. You settled for stories, not recordings. You made do with the bits you had and tried your best to fill in the rest.

- R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

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All her life, it seemed, she had run headfirst in precisely the wrong directions. It was not for lack of opportunity. She knew very well where the sun shone, and yet was bound by impulse to bury herself in the dark.

-R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

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‘Why d’you read then?’

‘Partly for pleasure, because it’s a habit and I’m just as uncomfortable if I don’t read as if I don’t smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has meaning for me, and it becomes a part of me; I’ve got out of the book all that’s any use to me, and I can’t get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one’s like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one; and at last the flower is there.’

- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

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Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

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What a fine thing it is that thinking is private, no matter what company you’re in.

- Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face

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London serves itself with no concession to the lives of those within, and the very best we can manage is to tie our patched histories to it.

- Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face

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But Eli, that’s who I was and I did those things. So who the fuck am I to absolve myself of anything now?

- Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face

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- Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face