Where Books and Readers Come Together
“The Bible in our Chinese Religion of good citizenship says: ‘Do not go against what is right to get the praise of the people. Do not trample upon the wishes of the people to follow your own desires.’”
“All literature is yet to be written.”
“You can’t live your life for other people. You’ve got to do what’s right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.”
“You find that it is the thing he is writing about that is interesting. Not the way it is written.”
“Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it.”
“What do all good stories do… They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”
“At that moment, she basked in a world without questions or answers. Without doubts or convictions. She basked in a world that was one with her.”
“We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends.”
“Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death.”
“I don’t mean the middle America of small minds and malt shops, or midcentury America, but rather the middle, the muddle, the void of America.”
“The soul says to her base earthly parts, ‘My exile is more bitter than yours: I am celestial.’”
“And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”
“I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth.”
“A common oblivion obliterates everything… The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.”
“And my eyes resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck… I cried out with myself as I admired this deliberately unfinished sketch: ‘How lovely she is! What true nobility! It is indeed a proud Guermantes.’”
