Literary Quotes

Taken from this newly discovered blog, Slaughterhouse 90210.

“I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream…he realizes that he’s gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.”

— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It makes me angry sometimes, it’s a visceral thing—how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren’t genuine, but because they are; because you’ve said them so many times, your ‘principles,’ your ‘ideals’—and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water

“I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.”

— Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir

“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(nice explanation of title on Wikipedia)

"I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don't feel a part of that world, and I wouldn't know how to join if I tried."

- Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!