Claire Zavoyna > Claire's Quotes

“The light of my eyes, I said, light of my eyes, light of the world, that's what you are, light of my life. I didn't know what light of my eyes meant, and part of me wondered where on earth had I fished out such claptrap, but it was nonsense like this that brought tears now, tears I wished to down in his pillow, soak in his bathing suit, tears I wanted him to touch with the tip of his tongue and make sorrow go away.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." (from "The Third and Final Continent")”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter Of Maladies

“Sexy means loving someone you do not know.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see. He looked at her face, which, it occurred to him, had not grown out of its girlhood, the eyes untroubled, the pleasing features unfirm, as if they still had to settle into some sort of permanent expression. Nicknamed after a nursery rhyme, she had yet to shed a childhood endearment.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“You are your best thing”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I'm like you,' he said. 'I remember everything.'

I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“In Jay's world, you could pin the sun to a wall, hang the moon from the ceiling. You could make the world a safer place. Nothing was impossible.”
― Romesh Gunesekera, Suncatcher

“I never believed the stars governed our lives; at least, I don't think I did then. I am not so sure now. Everything seems to have a shape pulled and turned by an unseen hand. Perhaps the stars are its fingertips”
― Romesh Gunesekera, Suncatcher

“What is your best subject? What are you good at? Anything?'
I went for what had to be most aggravating.
'Art. And English.”
― Romesh Gunesekera, Suncatcher

“They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day—and they’ve stopped trying. Now I just dream”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Although I live in the present, and do so with pathological fixity, I remember everything that has happened to me since I came to the Lager. Everything. To remember an hour would take an hour. To remember a month would take a month. I cannot forget because I cannot forget.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“Neffe, you're thinner. Though I'm one to talk.

Ah but I'm like the troubadour, Tantchen. Famished for love.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“... there are shadows because there are hills.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war--a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room With a View

“...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.”
― E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“And don't, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy's only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.”
― E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.”
― E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“Don't be mysterious; there isn't the time.”
― E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread