I want to be the girl with the most cake

Ett av mine nyttårsforsetter i år har vært å lese flere bøker. Jeg har gjort fremgang, men jeg burde fortsatt lese mye mer og stirre langt mindre på pc-skjermen. Her er noen fine sitater fra bøker jeg har lest den siste tiden:

Submarine av Joe Dunthorne
"I took a photo of us, mid-embrace. When I am old and alone I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful."

"I often imagine how people would react to my death."

"She's too good for me, she's too good for anyone! All I could do was let her know. I said: 'I love you more than words. And I am a big fan of words.' "

"I am suddenly aware of the separation between my-actual-self and myself-as-seen-by-others."

It's Kind of a Funny Story av Ned Vizzini
"I'm smart, but not enough - just smart enough to have problems."

"Some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle."

"Everybody has problems. Some people just hide their crap better than others."

"Bike, eat, drink, talk. Ride the subway, read, read maps. Make maps, make art. Finish the Gates application. Tell my dad not to stress about it. Hug my mom. Kiss my little sister. Kiss my dad. Make out with Noelle. Make out with her more. Take her on a picnic. See a movie with her. See a movie with Aaron. Heck, see a movie with Nia. Have a party. Tell people my story. Volunteer at 3 North. Help people like Bobby. Like Muqtada. Like me. Draw more. Draw a person. Draw a naked person. Draw Noelle naked. Run, travel, swim, skip. Yeah, I know it’s lame, but, whatever. Skip anyway. Breathe... Live."

Invisible Monsters av Chuck Palahniuk
"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice."

"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"

"Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong."

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."

"When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if they'd even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge."

"Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love."

"The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."

"Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most."

"If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible."

A Visit from the Goon Squad av Jennifer Egan
"How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?"

"Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them."

"I’m done. I’m old, I’m sad - that’s on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art."

"Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag, the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away."

The Discomfort Zone av Jonathan Franzen
"You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die."

"Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom."

On the Road av Jack Kerouac
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

"I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness."

"We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad."

“All I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.”

The Shadow of the Wind av Carlos Ruiz Zafón
"I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day"

"People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough."

"One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep"

"The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever."

"Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice."

"Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you."

"Memories are worse than bullets."

"The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul"

"So long as we are being remembered, we remain alive."

"Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day."

"Few things are more deceptive than memories."

The Angel's Game av Carlos Ruiz Zafón
"Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it"

"I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling"

"Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once, the rest is just scratches"

"Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive"

"Before I know it, I'll be thirty and I'll realise that every day I look less like the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen."

"When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimised, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbours, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we're acting in self-defence."

"It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar."

(Photocredit : Nishe)