Tag: quotation

…he doesn’t want you to admire him; he wants you to see him as he is. He wants you to tell him that his life, as inconceivable as it is, is still a life.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person has to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers, and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.

Peter Medawar

I believe that everyone has his own private happiness – when he has it. And to wish someone a happiness he might not want would be most imprudent. I don’t know exactly what you desire, and that is why I make my wishes extremely vague. But I have little fear of their not coming true. You have happiness within you: that is the safest, if not the only, way of having it. In any case, whatever may be the happiness you dream of (to dream of it is already to have it in the most ideal sense of the word, which as a good idealist I believe to be the only true one), I am sure it is a happiness of the very best quality.

Marcel Proust, from a letter to Horace de Landau written c. May 1894
(via mrsclarkkent)