And all I loved, I loved alone.
—Edgar Allan Poe
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
—Émile Zola
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“And maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us. What does it matter how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.” Gabriel Zaid
Charles De Lint, The Onion Girl
Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.
—C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail. It takes back bone to lead the life you want.
—Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
