“But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Slaughterhouse 90210
“Love without intimacy, she knew, was an unsung tune. It was all in your head. You said, ‘Listen to this!’ but what you found yourself singing was a tangle, a nothing, a heap.”
–Lorrie Moore, Like Life
“Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.”
—William Gibson, Zero History
“There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It’s like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“An orphan’s father is twice as important. Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.”
—Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son
“So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope…”
—Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
“…She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.”
—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
“Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.”
—Victor Hugo
“Gossip, as usual, was one-third right and two-thirds wrong.”
—L.M. Montgomery, Chronicles of Avonlea
“Shit is universal no matter which language.”
— Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star
