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quotespile · 4 hours
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You can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.
Zadie Smith, Feel Free
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quotespile · 7 hours
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“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
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quotespile · 9 hours
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Most schools have a loud system of loud bells, which startle the students and teachers at regular intervals and remind them that time is passing even more slowly than it seems.
Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
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quotespile · 12 hours
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“I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don’t like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground.”
— Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
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quotespile · 1 day
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Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?
Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
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quotespile · 1 day
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“The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable.”
— Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
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quotespile · 1 day
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Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes.
Richard Powers, The Overstory
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quotespile · 2 days
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“It’s a wonder I’m even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can’t believe I haven’t killed myself. But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.”
— Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors
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quotespile · 2 days
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Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep – living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.
Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life
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quotespile · 2 days
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“The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it’s the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me.”
— Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
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quotespile · 2 days
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You ever feel like home is the one place you can’t go back to? It’s like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I’ll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can’t go back because the house expects something from you.
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
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quotespile · 3 days
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“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
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quotespile · 3 days
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She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.
Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens
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quotespile · 3 days
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“Destiny is a good thing to accept when it’s going your way. When it isn’t, don’t call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.”
— Joseph Heller, God Knows
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quotespile · 3 days
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You undergo your own incarceration. You may witness your demise piece by piece. You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much.
Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace
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quotespile · 4 days
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“Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on ‘motherfucker.’”
— Colson Whitehead, The Noble Hustle
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quotespile · 4 days
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Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
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