32 quotes found
“Asking questions is an art.”
“Time. It rubs the rough edges that hurt us smooth.”
“Reading makes you impudent. Oh yes, unknown father, so it does.”
“Often its not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us.”
“Often it’s not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us.”
“And slowly, infinitely slowly, he began to trust. Not the sea, from from it; no one should make that mistake!”
“She'll be your dance partner, Jordan""Her? She's much too good. I'm scared!""Remember the feeling. Someday you'll want to write about it, and then it'll be good to know how the fear feels and to go...”
“I don't know how many years it's been since I last slept with my husband. I was faithful, stupid and so awfully lonely that I'll gobble you up if you're nice to me. Or kill you because I can't bear...”
“We cannot decide to love. We cannot compel anyone to love us. There's no secret recipe, only love itself. And we are at its mercy--there's nothing we can do.”
“Oh, merciless freedom, you continue to overwhelm me! You demand that I challenge myself and feel ashamed, and yet continue to feel so outrageously proud to live a life full of my desires.”
“Yes, the woman." Cunco took a deep breath. "Women like her don't come along that often, you know. Maybe only every two hundred years. She everything a man could dream of. Beautiful, clever, wise, c...”
“[Women] are superior beings to us men. When they love us, then they are being gracious, for only rarely do we give them reason to love us. I learned that from your mother, and she's right. Sad to s...”
“There are women who only look at another woman's shoes and never at her face.And others who always look women in the face and only occasionally at their shoes.”
“What a hideous life he had chosen, how painful was the loneliness he endured because he didn't have the courage to trust someone again. To trust someone entirely because in love there is no other way.”
“We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. ...Loving requires so much courage and so little expectation.”
“I'm looking for what I was capable of before... Or to be more precise, I'm trying to see whether I'm still capable of it.”
“It takes only one word to hurt a woman, a matter of seconds, one stupid, impatient blow of the crop. But winning back her trust takes years. And sometimes there isn't the time.”
“His reading aloud was constantly improving, and histories were more like radio plays. Perdu suspected that these small children, listening with eyes wide and in rapt concentration, would one day gr...”
“And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it...There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long. But it gets better. I know that now.”
“Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.”
“It's amazing how close you are to your essential self as a kid, he thought, and how far from it you drift the more you strive to be loved.”
“...having a child is like casting off your own childhood forever. It's as if it's only then that you really grasp what it means to be a man. You're scared too that all your weaknesses will be laid ...”
“When the stars imploded billions of years ago, iron and silver, gold and carbon came raining down. And the iron from that stardust is in us today-in our mitochondria. Mothers pass on the stars and ...”
