The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

"The painter considered for a few moments. 'He likes me,' he answered, after a pause; 'I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said. As a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.'"

"Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them."
"'Don't talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more wonderful thing than Art.' 'They are both simply forms of imitation,' remarked Lord Henry."

"There is always something ridiculous about the emotion of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him."

"He seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through. A dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once or twice, but there was the unreality of a dream about it."

"... but I am glad that you don't think I am heartless. I am nothing of the kind. I know I am not. And yet I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded."

"It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style."
"There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful."

Cry the Beloved Country

Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

“They must go on, said Msimangu gravely. You cannot stop the world from going on. My friend, I am a Christian. It is not in my heart to hate a white man. It was a white man who brought my father out of darkness. But you will pardon me if I talk frankly to you. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief- and again I ask your pardon- that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten.”

"I do not know she said. She said it tonelessly, hopelessly, as one who is used to waiting, to desertion. She said it as one who expects nothing from her seventy years upon the earth. No rebellion will come out of her, no demands, no fierceness. Nothing will come out of her at all, save the children of men who will use her, leave her, forget her. And so slight was her body and so few her years, that Kumalo for all his suffering moved to compassion.”

“Yes, it is dawn that has come. The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”

Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

" 'I wonder if anybody saw it there. While I was asleep, did you hear anything around town?' For in the vast blank of his freedom Rabbit remembered a few imperfections, his home, his wife's, their apartment, clots of concern."

"Once inside, as she reaches for the light switch, he knocks her arm down, pulls her around, and kisses her. It's insanity, he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it, love that glances and glides along the skin, he is unconscious of their skins, it is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely."

"Eccles asks, 'What did she do that made you leave?' 'She asked me to buy her a pack of cigarettes.' Eccles doesn't laugh as he had hoped; he seems to dismiss the remark as impudence, a little over the line. But it was the truth. 'It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don't know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and television going and meals late and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy.'"

" 'What do you think?' Rabbit asks. 'About what?' 'What shall I do?' Eccles glances up nervously. He is very tired; Harry has never seen him look so tired. His face has that pale babyish look of someone who has not slept enough. 'Do what you are doing,' he says. 'Be a good husband. A good father. Love what you have left.' 'And that's enough?' 'You mean to earn forgiveness? I'm sure it is, carried out through a lifetime.' "

" 'Go away,' she says. 'Go away.' 'Don't you need me?' "Need you,' she cries, and he squints in pain at the straining not of hysteria; he feels she has imagined this encounter so often she is determined to say everything, which will be too much. He sits down in an easy chair. His legs ache. She says, 'I needed you that night you walked out. Remember how much I needed you? Remember what you made me do?' 'She was in the hospital,' he says. 'I had to go.'"

For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

"So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it. Now, ahora, maintentant, heute."

"You ask for the impossible. You ask for the ruddy impossible. So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity. Do you hear that? In the old days people devoted a lifetime to it. And now when you have found it if you get two nights you wonder where all the luck came from. Two nights. Two nights to love, honor, cherish. For better and for worse. In sickness and in death. No that wasn't it. In sickness and in health. Til death do us part. In two nights. Much more than likely."

"No one could prove from the bodies of three wounded men, one with three bullet wounds in his abdomen, one with his jaw shot away and his vocal cords exposed, one with his femur smashed to bits by a bullet and his hands and face so badly burned that his face was just an eyelashless, eyebrowless, hairless blister that they were Russians. No one could tell from the bodies of these wounded men he would leave in beds at the Palace, that they were Russians. Nothing proved a naked dead man was a Russian. Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead."

East of Eden

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

"The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil."

"Maybe if I had loved him I would have been jealous of him. You were. Maybe- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself? I can see it pretty clearly. I can see how you loved him and what it did to you. I did not love him. Maybe he loved me. He tested me and hurt me and punished me and finally he sent me out like a sacrifice, maybe to make up for something. But he did not love you, and so he had faith in you."

"A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honest is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous."

"Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them."

"Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious beyond thinking, clean and loving, and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam's Cathy."

" 'Do you have hatred?' 'No, No- only a kind of sinking in the heart. Maybe later I'll sort it out to hatred. There was no interval from loveliness to horror, you see. I'm confused, confused.' Samuel said, 'One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now- why, you can't find all the cards.'"

" 'Did she mean to kill you?' 'I've thought of that more than anything else. No, I don't think she meant to kill me. She didn't allow me that dignity. There was no hatred in her, no passion at all. I learned about that in the army. If you want to kill a man, you shoot at head or heart or stomach. No, she hit me where she intended. I can see the gun barrel moving over. I guess I wouldn't have minded so much if she had wanted my death. That would have been a kind of love. But I was an annoyance, not an enemy.' 'You've given it a lot of thought,' said Samuel. 'I've had lots of time for it. I want to ask you something. I can't remember behind the last ugly thing. Was she very beautiful, Samuel?' 'To you she was because you built her. I don't think you ever saw her- only your own creation.' "

"'You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people thing it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.'"
"And of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule- a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting- only the deeply personal and familiar."

"The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind."

Giovanni's Room

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

"...for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to."

" 'Somebody,' said Jacques 'your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour- and in the oddest places!- for the lack of it."

"Her lips parted and she put her glass down with extraordinary clumsiness and lay against me. It was a gesture of great despair and I know that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come."

"Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love."

Running with Scissors

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

"I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen."

"But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because any attention is better than no attention. For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks- accidentally- and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive."

Falling Man

"Falling Man: A Novel" by Don DeLillo

"Lianne watched her. It was difficult to see her fitted so steadfastly to a piece of furniture, resigned and unstirring, the energetic arbiter of her daughter's life, ever discerning, the woman who'd given birth to the word beautiful, for what excites admiration in art, ideas, objects, in the faces of men and women, the mind of a child. All this dwindling to a human breath."

"Martin stood before the paintings. 'I'm looking at these objects, kitchen objects but removed from the kitchen, free of the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning. And I must be back in another time zone. I must be even more disoriented than usual after a long flight,' he said, pausing. 'Because I keep seeing the towers in this still life.'"

" 'Some people are lucky. The become who they are supposed to be,' he said. 'This did not happen to me until I met your mother. One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation."