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“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills

“You think it's all rather too "New Age" to be taken seriously, eh?'
'Not at all.'
'But it's an ancient discipline...'
'New Age disciplines invariably are,' Beede said, disparagingly, 'but in the modern world they lack context - we just pick them up and then toss them back down again, we consume them. They have no moral claim on us. No moral value. And without that they're rendered meaningless, fatuous, even.”
― Nicola Barker, Darkmans

“Books do furnish a room.”
― Anthony Powell, Dance to the Music of Time

“El alcohol (al igual que la mayor parte de las otras drogas) lleva la vida humana a veces un poco por encima y, casi siempre, muy por debajo de sus límites habituales.”
― Rafael Balanzá, Los asesinos lentos

“Me avergüenza sentir miedo, incluso en sueños, porque eso me revela que aún deseo estar vivo. El instinto de supervivencia es lo más humillante de todo.”
― Rafael Balanzá, Los asesinos lentos

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I exist in the eye of the storm, the calm in the centre of a perpetual hurricane of cars and lorries heading for the M6, the north and Scotland, or south to Penzance and Land’s End. I sometimes wonder if they don’t go on the motorway at all, that I hear the same vehicles circling endlessly, a kind of multiple Flying Dutchman, doomed to travel for ever. I don’t regret for one minute that I am no longer one of them.”
― Clare Morrall, The Roundabout Man

“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Netochka Nezvanova

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“The photographer was installed in the back of an inconspicurous dry-goods store in the poorer neighbourhood of Warsaw. He seemed to know all about me. His job was to prepare a picture of me which resembled me sufficiently to be claimed as mine, but in which the features were so vague that I could disown it if the need should arise.
He was a bold, spry little man who hardly replied to my few remarks. His deliberate taciturnity was not lost on me and I remained quiet while he concentrated on the task of turning out what proved to be a miniature masterpiece of photographic ambiguity. When it was finished he handed it to me with a pleased smile. I glanced at it and marveled aloud at his skill.
'It's incredible,' I said. 'It makes me feel as though I had met myself before but can't quite remember where.”
― Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State

“After five years I still had the impulse, every ten to twelve months, to find a new home. Spaces became too familiar, too elastic, too accommodating. Boredom and exasperation would set in. And though of course nothing really changed from one roof to another, I liked to harbor the illusion that small variations occurred within, that with each move something was being renewed.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

“I had no problem spending Monday through Friday alone, Saturdays were neutral, but each Sunday had to be reckoned with. There's solitude and then there's loneliness. Monday through Saturday were marked by solitude but on Sundays that solitude hardened into something else. I didn't necessarily want to spend my Sundays with someone, but on those days I was simply reminded, in the nagging pitch that only Sundays can have, that I was alone.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

“I should have moved to the forest long ago, I would think to myself, perhaps to the Black Forest although the place probably wasn't half as sequestered as I imagined, though no doubt there would be far fewer faces and voices, only the imperceptible cries of ants, the footsteps of spiders and the sound of trees growing. But the madness that remote places cultivate is not to be taken lightly and I've always found something particularly disquieting in madness left to quietly ferment on its own; the social functions required of us help us maintain, at the very last, an illusion of normality, and for that reason alone I had, until that point in my life, remained in the city.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

“At first this was not a problem since I had an aversion to naps and wore a sleeping mask at night, but after a while the sleeping mask began to feel like an albatross so I cast it aside.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

“It was quite a sight, Germans dancing, though I was used to it by then. Every now and then there was someone perfectly synchronized with the music, but most of the time I felt like I'd fallen into a colony of robots, each programmed differently and following a separate signal. If you observed them as a group you would never have thought they were responding to the same song.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

“My dear girl,' I answered in high spirits, for I felt elated at being active again. 'You are about to witness the birth of an immortal literary masterpiece. In a few moments, I shall begin the composition of an eloquent letter. This letter is going to be received by everyone in the Reich who has a Polish name. Or at least that is what shall try to accomplish. We want to remidn everyone of Polish origin that, although they are nominally German, Polish blood continues to flow in their veins.'
Danuta interrupted my oratory.
'Calm down, Witold. Don't excite yourself so. If you raise your voice much louder you shan't have to send any letters. Everybody in the Third Reich will have heard you, including the Gestapo.”
― Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State

“A man walks fast along the forecourt of the station towards a gate, moving towards a train that's about to leave. I get shivery all over as I watch the back of his head, which is about Yuan's height, with hair and a neckline just like his. My eyes tell me what my mind knows cannot be true. I follow him along seeking the one thing that would confirm him as someone else. The man turns his head slightly to talk to a train official. I can see his nose in profile. My eyes sting.”
― Dayo Forster, Reading the Ceiling

“She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said.
"How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading!
"I don't know," she said, shrugging.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“It’s me, you fool. Who do you think it is? I’m coming in.â€�
He was already naked. She turned away from him as he slipped in by her side but he caught her in his arms and felt her body thaw his belly and thighs. That was all, just to lie there listening to the breathing and the silence and feel the warmth colour his belly and thighs and head. She never wore clothes in bed. They were naked and the warmth run out of her. He wanted to laugh, because it was such a marvelous discovery to make, this warmth. She was hissing like a snake.
“No, it’s wrong.� She went on hissing.
She brought an elbow back smartly and struck him in the paunch. She seemed all elbows, shoulder blades and heels. It was like trying to make love to a dough-mixing machine. She wanted it, didn’t she, otherwise why all this hissing and moaning?”
― P.H. Newby, Something to Answer For

“I feel conscious that I should find no reason to regret abandoning so pleasant a manner of life and such valuable privileges to become a wife of anyone. Beside, marriag is not in my opinion, so exceedingly desirable as some persons think. A woman's career is over when she marries. Once married, all is fixed - certainty takes the place of all her pleasant dreams. For her, no more hopes, no more doubts, no more suspense, no more possibility of anything better. She knows what she is and will be until death. For my part, I like to give free scope to my thoughts.”
― Klementyna Tanska Hoffman, The Journal of Countess Françoise Krasinska

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another”
― Julian Barnes, Cross Channel

“Cain considers life and can find no explanation for it, there is that woman, who although clearly sick with desire is enjoying postponing the moment of surrender, which is not at all the right word, because lilith, when she does finally open her legs to allow herself to be penetrated, will not be surrendering, but trying to devour the man to whom she said, Enter.”
― José Saramago, Caim

“I've always made it a rule to have a suit for every day of the week. Perhaps you'll tell me I'm vain, but you'd be surprised if you knew what it had meant to me, at critical moments of my life, to be dressed exactly in accordance with my mood. It gives one such confidence, I think.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"
"The mood will pass, sir.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

“It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable.”
― L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Ludwik Szatera was a passionate lover of nostalgia. He could never come to terms with the eternal passage of men, objects and events. Each moment inexorably turning into the past was to him precious, invaluable, and he witnessed its passing with a sense of inexpressible regret.”
― Stefan GrabiÅ„ski, In Sarah's House

“The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos.”
― John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead

“Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.”
― Jeanette Winterson