Vive le Livre

If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us then there wouldn't be so much fuss about love in the first place.

That’s your strong point and your failing. You have a character that’s all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be a piece too -but that’s not how it is… All the variety, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

She revered solitude, but only because there was the possibility of breaking it.

As if it had suddenly started, he noticed the ticking of her clock. He felt luxurious. He took himself for granted, his legs, his sexual power, his fate. A consciousness that had faded came to life. It was like a film where the focus is blurred and shifting and all at once resolves; there leaps forth a hidden image, incorruptible, bright.

There's what you want and there's what's good for you, and when we're children we don't realize what a luxury it is to have our parents to tell us the difference.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

When I told Alma the things I saw she would laugh and tell me she loved my imagination. For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love, both sides were heads: I knew I couldn't lose.

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.

"Everyone must leave something in the room or left behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime"

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past"

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead”

“And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth”