Jaime > Jaime's Quotes

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“For the girls with messy hair and thirsty hearts.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
― Proust-M

“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World

“I respect people who get nerdy as fuck about something they love”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable

“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
― Marcel Proust

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”
― James Joyce

“We all have such fateful objects — it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another — carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Senna: “Why are you here?”
Isaac: “Because you are.”
― Tarryn Fisher, Mud Vein

“People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.”
― Marcel Proust

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way”
― Marcel Proust

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
― Marcel Proust

“...the way people pray- casting my plea into the ether. A plea to be understood. Looking for signs.”
― M. Pierce, Night Owl

“If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“I'm the next fucking Balzac. What about Proust?”
― M. Pierce, Night Owl