“At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.”
The Floating Opera by John Barth
“I think that to understand any one thing entirely, no matter how minute, requires the understanding of every other thing in the world.”
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.”
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
“Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.”
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
“A picture of my existence… would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow… stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.”
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
“I am always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
“I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.”
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
“Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, ‘I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.’”
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
“Don’t you think it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”
“That life — whatever else it is — is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
“They all — Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors — sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”
I had to include this as a bragging right since I have suffered through and finished it. Moby Dick was assigned reading for a college course that I had high hopes for. I fell in love with the first chapter and its poetic musings, but the rest of the book was a struggle to get through.
Thus, I recommend reading the first chapter and calling it a day.
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
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