anglicansaint-blog

[anglicansaint-blog]

She had had this mad hope of not dying alone, of taking her dearest friend with her. Now she is going to die alone. And this knowledge feeds her friendship with a terrible hatred.

Albert Camus, “Notebooks: 1935-1942

[anglicansaint-blog]

... Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way - I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

[anglicansaint-blog]

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

[anglicansaint-blog]

“…tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

[anglicansaint-blog]

I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood. Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance…Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom…But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

James Joyce, Araby

[anglicansaint-blog]

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

Stephen King

[anglicansaint-blog]

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

W. Somerset Maugham, Points of View

[anglicansaint-blog]

IF you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan

[anglicansaint-blog]

I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

[anglicansaint-blog]

Once I began a book, I couldn’t put it down. It was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I’d keep the book hidden so I could read during class. But I had almost no desire to talk with anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else.

Haruki Murakami

[anglicansaint-blog]

Though she had no one to write to, she had bought herself a blotter, a writing case, a pen and envelopes; she would dust off her whatnot, look at herself in the mirror, take up a book, and then begin to daydream and let it fall to her lap....She wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

[anglicansaint-blog]

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can’t really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, ‘If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we’ll talk.’ All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don’t want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.

Ray Bradbury

[anglicansaint-blog]

I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

[anglicansaint-blog]

The day you died I went into the dirt, Into the lightless hibernaculum Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.

"Electra on Azalea Path" by Sylvia Plath

[anglicansaint-blog]

"when we were flesh we were eaten when we were metal we were burned back there was no death anywhere but now"

C. K. Williams

[anglicansaint-blog]

People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and that they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not too indefinite for words, but rather too definite.

Felix Mendelssohn

[anglicansaint-blog]

The paradise of her childhood had been in books.

Anais Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart