top of page
"I love the smell of old books, Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes

"Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism."

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."

"It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them."

"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."

"In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality."

"For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all."

"In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river."

"And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head."
Explore more quotes by Rebecca McNutt

"Life is not the end, and death is just the beginning..."

"Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep."

"When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy."

"He didn't remember the very first time he actually died very well. It wasn't as bad as remediation, but he remembered being afraid and worried and when he found himself alive again a few hours later with Mearth's wild green eyes peering down at him, he remembered still being afraid and worried. It was strange, he thought, to be afraid of being alive but being alive was worse than being dead in his mind."

“Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after—you know—after the funeral. We haven't had the money for any of your weird little games, and I was hoping you'd be more mature now that Jud's gone,” her father had added disappointedly.
“How much'd that cake cost you?”
“It's paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy's last year, and I—it was my birthday, Dad!”
“You can't even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained.
Mandy hadn't cried; she'd only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “I'm normal.”

"And what if you could go back in time and take all those hours of sorrow and insanity and replace them with something better?"
bottom of page