-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
"We live, as we dream--alone..."
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."
-Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
James Leer: "The doors made so much noise!"
Grady Tripp: "Is he all right?"
James Leer: "It was so embarrasing! He had to be carried out."
Terry Crabtree: "He's fine. He's narrating."
James Leer: "They were going to the restroom. But would they make it in time?"
-Wonder Boys
"I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death."
-Charles Dickens, Great expectations
"You know, in China they say, 'The thinner the chopsticks, the higher the social status.' Of course, I got the thinnest I could find.....that's why people hate me."
-Martha Stewart
"Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once."
-Ernest Hemingway, Farewell to Arms
"Rotten, rotten old world," broke out Eleanor suddenly, "and the wretchedest thing of all is me--oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid? Look at you; you're stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified--and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what's in store for me--I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I'm too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. Every year that I don't marry I've got less chance for a first-class man. At the best I can have my choice from one or two cities and, of course, I have to marry into a dinner-coat."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
-Virginia Woolf
"I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea."
-Henry Fielding
"You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition's given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamb? You know how quickly the boys found you... all those tedious sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars... while you could only dream of getting out... getting anywhere... getting all the way to the FBI."
-The Silence of the Lambs
il faut d'abord durer.