I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. — J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction. (Back Bay Books January 30, 2001) Originally published 1955, Advertisements
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd. ― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales. (Penguin Classics, May 1, 1999) Originally published 1911.
Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit. — Neil Gaiman,… Continue reading Neil Gaiman
If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “Head and Shoulders,” The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Modern Library; Modern Library Pbk. Ed edition, November 8, 2005) Originally published 1924.
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night… — Vladimir Nabokov, from “A Letter that Never Reached Russia,” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore. — Ernest Hemingway, from “A Way You’ll Never Be,” Winner Take Nothing. (Scribner; 1 edition, January 1, 1966)
