bookquotesforthesoul - Tumblr blog

[bookquotesforthesoul]

You forgot to wish for money, for health, for a robust sense of life; you only wished to write.

-Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Yesterday was a good day until I checked my email, then my life suddenly became cluttered.

-Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I wonder if that's what life is going to be - a gradual process of moving away from all the things which seemed to promise a centre.

-Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Return to the potatoes once cooled. Bring nothing with you. Slice them, when you're ready, with a sharp knife. Don't forget the steam. More salt. Always more than you think. To serve, one whole potato per person. Each a slip of oil, a melt on the tongue. Every private bite. The next time you want something - anything - remember the feel of the potato in your hand.

- Temim Fruchter, City of Laughter

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I like baffled people. I think they are right to stagger around the Met discombobulated, and more educated people are wrong when they take what they see in stride. Baffled people are surprised by things that are, in fact, surprising - that a Picasso is right there for them to breathe on, that an Egyptian temple has been picked up and moved to New York.

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

[bookquotesforthesoul]

If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge.

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

[bookquotesforthesoul]

When she made things grow, she experienced a kind of manifest forgiveness, an abiding moving-on and making-new that she found impossible in almost every other sphere of life.

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

[bookquotesforthesoul]

To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't?

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Having dreaded birthdays all my life, I discovered the texture of my own contentment.

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I've always had a strong instinct for good friends, by which I mean that I know right away when I meet someone with whom I'll fit platonically. There's a sort of shimmering between us, as Joan Didion described the subjects she was drawn to writing about, only with early friendship it feels like slipping on a clean dress or moving furniture to just the right spot in a room.

Sarah Viren, To Name the Bigger Lie

[bookquotesforthesoul]

The room gasped and momentarily we fell silent with awe and gratitude at the sound this young woman had brought into the room. It was a question that she was the answer to.

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Spectacle is the right to capture, to capture what is deemed abjection, and the right to publish it. Spectacle is a relation of power. It has a long life and a big sound.

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

[bookquotesforthesoul]

There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book's explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity.

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Some people set the key of their lives inside you and simply turn.

Bryan Washington, Family Meal

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I had that landscape feeling on the journey down to Folkestone. The line through the countryside was a closing zip and I was moving on.

Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I realise I am not listening to him, I am just watching him for clues.

Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren

[bookquotesforthesoul]

This is a roundabout way of saying that I fell in love when I was twenty-two years of age, and it was a complete surprise. As if this tender beast had been inside me all along, kicking and turning, and I had not known it was there.

Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren