In that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you're thinking of something good or bad, it always leaves you a little emptier afterward.
—John Corey Whaley in Noggin
Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace.
—Paul Murray in Skippy Dies
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.
—Louise Erdrich in The Painted Drum
Your mind has a way of not letting you forget things you wish you could. Especially with people. Like, you'll always try your best to forget things that people say to you or about you, but you always remember. And you'll try to forget things you've seen that no one should see, but you just can't do it.
—John Corey Whaley in Where Things Come Back
Pain was my tie to a past that a part of me wanted to hold on to. The more I hurt, the more I knew I loved, and that felt like a good thing.
—Daria Snadowsky in Anatomy of a Single Girl
The best way to teach your kids about taxes is by eating 30% of their ice cream.
—Bill Murray
Do you ever feel like what's happening at this moment will never happen again? Like you could never repeat it, no matter how hard you tried?
—Jennifer E. Smith in Field Notes on Love
Bitterness is one of the deadliest emotions we ever feel. You can't look forward when you're bitter, only backward — thinking about what you've lost, stuck in the past, despairing because it's gone.
—Lynn Austin in All Things New
Kids don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.
—Jim Henson in It's Not Easy Being Green
In this business you either sink or swim or you don't.
—David Smith
The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.
—Charles Darwin
Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.
—Louise Erdrich in The Round House
Unless you've touched a corpse before, you can't comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother's face. You feel sick with guilt and regret and sadness about inconsequential anecdote. You can't remember anything thoughtful or sweet or tender that you ever did even though logically you know you must have. All you can recall is how often you were small and petty and false. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and now she's gone.
—Elan Mastai in All Our Wrong Todays
Most often in the summertime, she's holed up somewhere with a book, sometimes not saying more than a few words in a whole day.
—Katrin Schumann in The Forgotten Hours
I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
—E. V. Lucas