"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."
—  Jeffrey Eugenides (via slekes)
1 year ago  #quote #lit #prose  854 notes
"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe."
—  Neil Gaiman (via slekes)
1 year ago  #quote #lit #prose  273 notes
"If you take a book with you on a journey, an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else."
—  Cornelia Funke  (via slekes)
1 year ago  #quote #lit #prose  104 notes
"Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping, waiting and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir - open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us - guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love, the clarity of hatred, the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we’d know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion - we’d be truly dead."
—  Joss Whedon  (via slekes)

(via cardigaans-deactivated20110929)

1 year ago  #quote #lit #prose  98 notes
"I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding."
—  Donald Miller  (via slekes)

(via cardigaans-deactivated20110929)

1 year ago  #quote #lit #prose  777 notes
"In the silence, I remembered this one time that I never told anybody about. The time we were walking. Just the three of us. And I was in the middle. I don’t remember where we were walking to or where we were walking from. I don’t even remember the season. I just remember walking between them and feeling for the first time that I belonged somewhere."
—  Stephen Chobsky (via slekes)
1 year ago  #quote #lit #prose  141 notes
"Sometimes I read the same books over and over and over. What’s great about books is that the stuff inside doesn’t change. People say you can’t judge a book by its cover but that’s not true because it says right on the cover what’s inside. And no matter how many times you read that book the words and pictures don’t change. You can open and close books a million times and they stay the same. They look the same. They say the same words. The charts and pictures are the same colors. Books are not like people. Books are safe."
— Kathryn Erskine (via slekes)
1 year ago  #quote #lit #prose  74 notes
"Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different."
— Margaret Atwood (via slekes)
1 year ago  #quote #lit #prose  69 notes
"We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers."
— Milan Kundera (via slekes)
1 year ago  #quote #lit #pose  1,523 notes
← Previous
Next →