Tina > Tina's Quotes

“Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself.
- But your yourself sucks!
- It is, lamentably, all I have.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“That's what war was. A great motion and then a great stillness in which the winner crouches and the loser lies facing the sky.”
― Kathy Hepinstall, Blue Asylum

“I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen first hand that I didn't immediately reference to amp is of a TV show. You know the awful singsong the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“You do realize, that if you actually dated her, saw her on a regular basis, lived with her, that she would find some fault with you, right? That she would find some things about you that drove her crazy. That she'd make demands of you that you wouldn't like. That she'd get angry at you?”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men - friends, coworkers, strangers - giddy over these awful pretender women, and I'd want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I'd want to grab the poor guy by the lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn't really love chili dogs that much - no one loves chili dogs that much!”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It's the same as a runner's high. These days, we spend our lives staring at screens twelve inches in front of us.”
― Maria Semple

“My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I'm going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I'm about to kick the shit out of life.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“Ollie-O was in a semicatatonic state, uttering nonsensical phrases like "This is not biodegradable - the downstream implications are enormous - the optics make for rough sledding - going forward -" before getting stuck on the words "epic fail," which he kept repeating.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“But there was also something swimming, an idea, a dream of what we were striving for and what it would look like when we got there. Then we got there, and it didn't look the same at all, somehow...Are all human beings malcontents?”
― David Maine, An Age of Madness

“Whatever secrets the dead take with them, they should be allowed to keep. That's my new philosophy. Or put another way: the time to properly know someone is when he, or she, is still alive.”
― David Maine, An Age of Madness

“Kafka, in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.”
― Murakami, Haruki

“People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve lost what’s inside me - and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I’ll become. Something’s wrong with this picture. Life isn’t supposed to turn out like this! Isn’t it possible to shift direction, to change where I’m headed?”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am - for just an example - self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact that here at least I am worrying about it; so then I feel better about myself (I mean, at least this stuff is on my mind, at least I'm dissatisfied with my level of integrity and commitment); but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to (imagined) Others...It has to do with God and gods and a basic sense of trust in the universe v. fear that the universe must be held at bay and micromanaged into giving me some smidgen of some gratification I feel I simply can't live without. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am - so where does that put me.”
― D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

“I didn't stand for anything. If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“He wanted to meet her for the first time, over and over...He told himself the story that this was the great tragedy of his heart. The great tragedy of his heart was that it always needed to be told a story.”
― Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man

“One of the many things TV does not show you is the potential range and horror of the human form. For this alone, thought Alex, it is rightly celebrated.”
― Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man

“People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.”
― Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man

“I measure my life out in books."
"You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?”
― Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children

“Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“It's as if your money, by conceit inexhaustible, isn't real, so your generosity isn't real, either.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Now, over the years I've been forced to conclude that most celebrations don't work. The more carefully planned a signal occasion, the more likely it will trickle by on a pale tide of dilute well-meaningness. Christmases, birthdays, award ceremonies, and weddings are swallowed by planning and preparation on the one side and cleaning up on the other, and almost never seem to have actually happened.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother