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“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.”
― Dorothy Parker, Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker

“Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”
― Kathryn Schulz

“A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing.”
― J.D. Salinger

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).”
― William Maxwell

“Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.”
― Donald Hall

“If you try to write posthumously, however, fashion doesn’t apply. You step off the catwalk, ignoring this season’s trends and resigning yourself to being unfashionable and possibly unnoticed, at least for a while. As Kurt Woolf, Kafka’s first publisher in Germany, wrote to him after Kafka’s book tanked, “You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately.â€� Fashion is the attempt to evade that principle: to be the echo of someone else’s success and, therefore, to create nothing that might create an echo of its own.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides

“Toward nightfall, Khrenov’s temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive—the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking his head. Then he fell asleep. Natasha undressed by a candle’s wan flame, and saw her reflection in the murky glass of the window—her pale, thin neck, the dark braid that had fallen across her clavicle. She stood like that, in motionless languor, and suddenly it seemed to her that the room, together with the couch, the table littered with cigarette stubs, the bed on which, with open mouth, a sharp-nosed, sweaty old man slept restlessly—all this started to move, and was now floating, like the deck of a ship, into the black night.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.”
― James Wood

“Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.”
― Louise Bogan

“ANOTHER TWILIGHT
Allow the point of the Croccodrillo
its hazy cypress trees in profile
Like a rough sketch for the Isle
of the Dead, as seen from yellow
stucco, his Villa Igea where Lawrence
finished "Sons and Lovers," wild thyme
scenting olive-grove grass, crime
scenery come back to more than once.
Again you're mirrored in lake shadow,
a white sail flaking on its turquoise
wavelets, keep awake by traffic noise
Along the Gardesana...and you know
that this beauty's unbearable as before
even if seen from its opposite shore.”
― Peter Robinson

“I’m not going to stand for it any longer," said Mr. Flood. "I’m going to put my foot down. All I want in this world is a little peace and quiet, and he gets me all raced up. Here a while back I heard a preacher talking on the radio about the peacefulness of the old, and I thought to myself, ‘You ignorant man!â€� I’m ninety-four years old and I have never yet had any peace, to speak of. My mind is just a turmoil of regrets. It’s not what I did that I regret, it’s what I didn’t do. Except for the bottle, I always walked the straight and narrow; a family man, a good provider, never cut up, never did ugly, and I regret it. In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what’s the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can’t hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face on that woman so clear it hurts, and there’s never a day passes I don’t think about her, and there’s never a day passes I don’t curse myself. ‘What kind of a timid, dried-up, weevily fellow were you?â€� I say to myself. ‘You should’ve said to hell with what’s right and what’s wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You’d have something to remember, you’d be happier now.â€� She’s out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she’s been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two."

"Life is sad," said Mr. Maggiani.”
― Joseph Mitchell, Old Mr. Flood

“Nuance is anathema to his thinking, which is why he can maintain such fidelity to his ideas in a-hundred-and-forty-character bursts.”
― Jelani Cobb

“But our desks were never meant to be our altars.”
― Derek Thompson

“But our desks were never meant to be our altars.”
― Derek Thompson [The New Yorker]