Literature Love

All of my favorite quotes, from all of my favorite books.

[quotablelit]

All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

[observando]

Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (via observando)

[quotablelit]

He had become reconciled to all this, yet all the same from time to time the terrible thought of the straight road would overcome him - a road along which he was being pursued, where he was visible to everyone, and from which he could not turn aside.

Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

[quotablelit]

It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

[quotablelit]

It is the people who remember, but when the people are gone we won’t have anyone to remember. People go to a lot of trouble to make things memorable. I would like to make things enjoyable by watching everyone, and wondering what is going on. Today I am as full of this day as the air in this apartment is full of particulate matter that sparkles off the highway. A sliver of the moon is still visible at midday. Reading the news is unbearable, but necessary. All exits are final and all that.

Todd Colby, “Brilliant Juice”

[quotablelit]

We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.

Kurt Vonnegut, “Deadeye Dick”

[quotablelit]

They talked of harvests moving north. It was warm and soft. I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men. Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

[observando]

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that’s where I imagine it - there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (via observando)

[quotablelit]

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

[quotablelit]

'It's not what enters men's mouths that's evil,' said the alchemist. 'It's what comes out of their mouths that is.'

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

[serymn]

A flower does not think of competing to the flower next to it. It just blooms.

from Zen Shin Talks  (via lovely—delight)

[observando]

Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly.

Langston Hughes (via observando)

[quotablelit]

That’s all that life has to give in the way of perfection….the warm and complete understanding of two, or three, in a close-walled room with the windows blind to the world.

Tennessee Williams, The Strangest Kind of Romance

[beartreadway]

“I’m a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that’s me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I’d die; I don’t know what of, I just knew I’d die.”

John Marsden 'A Killing Frost' (via beartreadway)

[quotablelit]

If you are not admired, no one will take the trouble to disapprove.

Truman Capote, “Children On Their Birthday”

[quotablelit]

Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

[quotablelit]

Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend.

Huruki Murukami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle