just literature quotes

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

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The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.

José Saramago, Cain

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“But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.”

— James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

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She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain. In many ways she was more uncertain now than she had been as a girl. And often when she heard herself speaking she was appalled at how chirpy she sounded — how empty-headed and superficial, as if she’d somehow fallen into the Mom role in some shallow TV sitcom. What on earth had happened to her?

Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

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“He doesn’t blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.”

— John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

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What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet. You can wash it, and wash it, and still never forget what has transpired — a word which here means ‘happened, and made everybody sad.’

Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

[thirdity]

“You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations

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As disappointed as I am, I’m not surprised that my beloved stationery store no longer exists, the rents must be sky-high around here, and furthermore, who buys notebooks in the end? My students can barely write by hand, they press buttons to learn about life and explore the world. Their thoughts emerge on screens and dwell inside clouds that have no substance, no shortage of space.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

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“But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you’re lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense — stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety — is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself… in a way other people just can’t.”

— Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

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This is how we all come to the world... Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

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“This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them.”

— Richard Powers, The Overstory

[suliqyre]

I was asked a question. I'm fairly certain that's what happened. We were walking and talking and I wasn't quite following the conversation when suddenly there was a question sent in my direction. What the question was, I have no idea. A glance over at the other reveals nothing. I could ask him to repeat himself, but...

Asking for the words to be repeated feels impertinent. I'm worried that the question came with a certain weight. It was heavy enough that asking for it to be repeated would be an error. I somehow know this even though I can't recall the question...

The only available option seems to be to say nothing at all. But surely I can't say nothing! That would be even worse. A weighty question deserves a weighty answer. But sometimes nothing of equal weight is on hand...

Read more...

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Of all the mad things we humans do ... there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was the best kind of fool’s errand.

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

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“To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you.”

— Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

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My evidence — such as it is — is almost always intimate. I feel this — do you? I’m struck by this thought — are you?

Zadie Smith, Feel Free

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“I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy – who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity – only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart – does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn’t. I swear it.”

— Saul Bellow, Herzog

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Everything that I could see was beautiful. I cried and cried, standing there, surrounded by that beauty, even though I wasn’t standing anywhere. I could hear the sound of my own tears. Everything was beautiful. Not that there was anyone to share it with, anyone to tell. Just the beauty.

Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night