Such grief does not even want consolation; it is nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness. Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irritate the wound.
“
| — |
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (via dsm296)
|
But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?
“
| — |
From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
|
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
“
| — |
From Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (via larmoyante)
|
What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How long had they walked together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time seemed now. How immense a figure she was on the stage before him; what a shadow she threw on the wall with her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink. And if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would.
“
| — |
From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
|
People were more often…blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people’s faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
“
| — |
From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
|
There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood.
“
| — |
From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
|
From Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
My advice to all those who are going to find themselves is: stay exactly where you are. Otherwise you are in great danger of losing yourself for ever.
“
| — |
From The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder
|
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.
“
| — |
From Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (via larmoyante)
|
The Pennants of Passive Attitudes and Emotions from The Tunnel by William Gass (via nevver)
The number doesn’t matter. If I got down to 70.00, I’d want 65.00. If I weighed 10.0, I wouldn’t be happy until I got down to 5.00. The only number that would ever be enough would be 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point.
“
| — |
From Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson (via larmoyante)
|
And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it.
“
| — |
From The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (via larmoyante)
|
I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.
“
| — |
From Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (via larmoyante)
|
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
From Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
