oliver > oliver's Quotes

“He would not deceive himself so much. He would not – and this was the test – pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Be excellent to each other.”
― Bill S. Preston Esquire

“Things would have turned out better is she had lived. As it was, she died when I was kid;and thought everything that happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Now he was dying. A past of questionable honesty had faded and he looked forward to joining those he loved and to be joined in due season by those whom he left behind.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch