My love of other people's words borders somewhere on the edge of obsession (well, more truthfully, I've likely leaped into the abyss!). Life Sentences is a random celebration of sentences/phrases/thoughts/words and of the authors who brought them to life.
We are who we pretend to be. So we must be careful who we pretend to be.
The best stories are like that. They’re like spaceships. They take you somewhere far away and you think, oh, what a weird place. But then you think, wait, maybe I’ve been here before. Maybe I was even born here.
There comes a point in any game of patience—I used to reach it in chess on about the tenth move—when the longing for a spontaneous action, even a suicidal action, feels infinitely preferable to more agonized, self-controlled thought.
We are who we pretend to be. So we must be careful who we pretend to be.
(Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night)
In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
(Junot Díaz, This is How You Lose Her)
Heartbreak, grief and suffering rip openings in us through which the dark end of wonder pours.
(David James Duncan, God Laughs and Plays)
In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
(Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin)
(Victor Lodato, Mathilda Savitch)
It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit.
(Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections)
(David James Duncan, The Brothers K)
