All Quotes By Tag: Fiction
“Look at yourself for a change! You’ll be counting the grains of rice I buy next! Talk about tight – Scrooge has nothing on you!”
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“Joanna swooned on hearing his voice and knew immediately that she would more than merely like him. Could be love at first type, she thought. It was a voice so luscious that only a hunk of a dreamboat could possess”
“Looking for my final love with someone who is ready to settle down. Of course dating is great initially, but I don’t wish to be dating indefinitely, so if you’re looking for an indefinite dating partner, please pass me by.”
“Can I get two coffees?’ Joanna cringed. That cashier ought to tell her straight that she may have two coffees, but she certainly can’t get them because customers aren’t allowed behind the counter!”
“Conscious of the way spinach has a habit of flaunting itself between front teeth, she packed tooth picks in her new clutch bag.”
“Remember what he said about my picture: I’m lovely and it made him do double cartwheels. Remember also that he’s prone to hyperbole, so don’t take everything he says literally.”
“. . . forgive meIf you are not livingif you, my beloved, my loveif youhave died,all the leaves will fall on my breastit will rain upon my soul night and daythe snow will burn my heart,I shall walk with cold and fire and death and snowmy feet will want to march toward where you sleep,but I shall go on living . . .”
“The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not.””I don’t despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare’s heroines before I was twelve.””But they don’t exist, dear man, that’s the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.”
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“Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, ‘Don’t get lost in the drama of life,’ and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.”
“And once you’ve been to this Center, this Truth, you’ll know your way everywhere. You are never lost again.”
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“It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.”
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“All I’m saying is that there is more to life than the main story. Check out the notes in the margins because maybe they’re even more important.”
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“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing–until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
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“When you read the account of a murder – or, say, a fiction story based on murder – you usually begin with the murder itself. That’s all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. […] The murder itself is the end of the story. It’s Zero Hour.”He paused.“It’s Zero Hour now.”
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