just literature quotes

a collection of literary quotations, mostly from fiction curated by: @suliqyre instagram & threads: @lit.snaps mastodon: @[email protected]

[quotespile]

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

[quotespile]

“Just when we think we have a system, the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we think we know what’s coming next, everything changes.”

— Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

[quotespile]

You believed that no harm would reach you, because you were protected, not by angels, but by the laws of probability which stated that really bad things happened not very often, except when they did.

Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

[quotespile]

“Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

[quotespile]

Creativity, as usually understood, entails not only a “what,” a talent, but a “who” — strong personal characteristics, a strong identity, personal sensibility, a personal style, which flow into the talent, interfuse it, give it personal body and form. Creativity in this sense involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one’s mind — while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.

Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

[thirdity]

“The principal plays of Shakespeare are plays about self-consciousness, about characters not acting so much as dramatizing themselves in roles. Prince Hal is the man of perfected self-consciousness and self-control, triumphing over the man of rash, unself-conscious integrity, Hotspur, and over the sentimental, cowardly, self-conscious man of pleasure, Falstaff. Achilles and Oedipus do not see themselves as, but are, hero and king. But Hamlet and Henry V see themselves as acting parts — the part of the avenger, the part of the heroic and confident king leading his troops to battle.”

— Susan Sontag, “The Death of Tragedy”

[quotespile]

Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

[quotespile]

“Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.”

— Michael Chabon, Summerland

[quotespile]

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

[quotespile]

“My longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.”

— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

[quotespile]

A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood.

Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

[quotespile]

“We talk about what to do with the atom bomb… but man’s heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man’s efforts at order an attempt to still man’s fear of himself?”

— Richard Wright, The Outsider

[quotespile]

If you were going to be miserable, you could be miserable anywhere. She’d known that for years: the way one person could starve to death at the banquet, the way you could sob through the funniest movie.

Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

[quotespile]

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[quotespile]

I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea

[quotespile]

“There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.”

— Richard Wright, The Outsider

[quotespile]

I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

Elif Batuman, Either/Or