Quotes – Page 256 | Just Great DataBase

I felt the unbroken line of me and of her stretching back from our cribs to the dead guy to acquaintanceship to now. And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.

By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in peace. But I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it’s false news, it must mean something.

First you borrow, then you beg.

The heart jealous of the soul!

It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the everexpanding perimeters of our lives.

It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was.

The flowers were like new acquaintances; she approached them in a familiar spirit, and made herself at home among them.

Of the many things hidden from the knowledge of man, nothing is more unintelligible than the human heart.

She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality.

I have now reached the stage that I don’t care much whether I live or die. The world will still keep turning without me; what is going to happen, will happen, and anyway it’s no good to resist. I will trust luck and do nothing but work, hoping that all will end well.

Catholics are always trying to find out if you’re a Catholic.

I don’t want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others […]

Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have ’em?

She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope.

I’ll kill him though,’ he said. ‘In all his greatness and his glory.

I was suffocating even before we left the house, but no one bothered to ask me how I felt.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.

The trucks roll monotonously onwards, the shouts are monotonous, the falling rain is monotonous. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead men up at the front of the truck, on the body of the little recruit with a wound that is far too big for his hip, it’s falling on Kemmerich’s grave, and it’s falling in our hearts.

She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.