All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
Being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.
Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on...
Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.
Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.
Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.
Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.
I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.
I hate time. It never does what you want it to.
It takes a child to say the unsayable.
It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.
It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.
Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.
One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands- literally thousands- of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.
Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.
Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.
Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.
Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.
The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.
The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.
The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
The trouble with history is that there are too many people involved.
The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.
Unhappiness really meant something... Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money.
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.
We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?
We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.
Women who disapprove of men- and there's plenty to disapprove of- should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.
You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.
Found 35 occurence(s) in 52,075 quotation(s).
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