"Sometimes I think I understand the way things work. And then I find out that on Neptune it rains diamonds."
— Sarah Manguso, “Beautiful Things”
"[T]hey looked and moved as if a calm and orderly escape from this place had become the one great necessity of their lives, as if, in fact, they wouldn’t be able to begin to live at all until they were out beyond the rumbling pink billows of exhaust and the crunching gravel of this parking lot, out where the black sky went up and up forever and there were hundreds of thousands of stars."
— Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Rainy Day
The five greatest rainy day albums of all time (as voted on by me):
1. Kings of Convenience- Riot on an Empty Street
2. Nick Drake- Pink Moon
3. Radiohead- Amnesiac
4. Simon and Garfunkel- Bookends
5. Damien Jurado- Saint Bartlett
"I am a giant, a mountain, a planet. Everything else is far off below. My footprints are countries, my shadow a time zone. I watch from high windows. I wash in high clouds."
— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
"So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? The lie is that it’s one or the other."
— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
"He could not love me very much, I protested, because all he said was that he loved me…[t]hose truly in love spoke poetry to their beloved."
— Julia Alvarez, In the Time of Butterflies
"
The world is not ideas…the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams; the world…is things. Things and their makers rule the world; look at…all the powerful; they make things. For things…five hundred million stay hungry. When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don’t, you fight.
But people are not things; if we come together, if we love each other, if we show that this, just this, this people-together…this…sticking-together-through-thick-and-thin, can be that third way.
"— Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
"Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence."
— Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
"The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
— Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train
"[A]nyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it."
— Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
