Leviathan Quotes
"You don’t want to get stuck in the past. Life is too interesting for that."
"It’s the symbol of our country, and we have to show it the proper respect."
"I felt as if I’d struck a blow for democracy, as if I’d risen up in the name of oppressed peoples all over the world."
"He was telling her that she didn’t have to give him a child to make him go on loving her."
"In order to do what I have to do, I have to assume they’re already closing in on him, that sooner or later they’re going to find out who he was."
"Once we acquired the power to destroy ourselves, the very notion of human life had been altered; even the air we breathed was contaminated with the stench of death."
"A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen."
"I don’t need to add that I turned him down, but if the circumstances had been any different, I probably would have thought twice about accepting his help."
"As long as I behaved myself, she wouldn’t hold my past sins against me."
"The coincidence helped to form a link between us."
"Remembering the early days of the friendship now, I am struck most of all by how much I admired the two of them."
"He could be maddeningly oblivious when it came to such things."
"Work was like an athletic contest for him, an endurance race between his body and his mind."
"The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me."
"Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart."
"The more we talked, the more definite our plan became."
"She fell in love with one of the people in the book and wound up marrying him."
"I had thrown away eleven years of my life in search of a figment."
"It was a pure and luminous gesture of self-sacrifice."
"Loving her was simple, even if everything that surrounded that love was fraught with ambiguity."
"You don’t have to feel that you’re betraying Ben."
"Every man is the prisoner of his pecker, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it."
"Words have power, after all. For some women, there’s no stronger aphrodisiac."
"Once you turn against yourself, it’s hard not to believe that everyone else is against you, too."
"I was out of control, and I fucked for the same reason that other men drink: to drown my sorrows, to dull my senses, to forget myself."
"I had become interchangeable with my work, and I accepted that work on its own terms now, understanding that nothing could relieve me of the desire to do it."
"It’s difficult to gauge the full extent of Sachs’s disappointment."
"The press was mute. All the arguments had suddenly been appropriated by the other side, and to raise one’s voice against it was considered bad manners."
"Even if my life fell apart, there would still be something to live for."
"The real damage had little to do with Sachs’s body. This is the thing I’m still struggling to come to terms with, the mystery I’m still trying to solve."
"If I’d really been serious about chasing after Maria Turner, why did I go to such ridiculous lengths to trick her into touching me?"
"His guilt was a foregone conclusion, and the less time he wasted on it the better."
"We were all growing old, and the only thing we could count on anymore was each other."
"Because of Fanny, we had each crossed over into the other’s life, had each made a mark on the other’s internal history, and what had once been pure and simple between us was now infinitely muddy and complex."
"Even if the buildings of Manhattan were about to uproot themselves, just take off from the ground and never come back again."
"As I write about this now, it sounds a lot worse than it actually was, at least in terms of what I imagined I was doing."
"This was how he found the courage to talk to Fanny about a trial separation."
"I don’t blame him for what he did. I don’t blame him for telling Fanny to leave him or for wanting to change his life."
"The affair with Charles caught her by surprise, and in those early stages she was still too confused to know what her feelings were."
"On the surface, things purred along as they had for the past several months."
"Again, I had been confronted with a significant piece of evidence, and again I had ignored it."
"But that doesn’t mean these new times were less good than the old. In many ways, they were better."
"Every day was more or less a repetition of the day before."
"When they’re there for you in the flesh, the real world is sufficient. When you’re alone, you have to invent imaginary characters."
"Sachs had never been a well-organized person, and it startled me to see how thoroughly he had prepared for our visit."
"I’m tempted to say that it was just like old times, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate."
"If I had bothered to open my eyes for a few minutes, I might have noticed something."
"The sun shone on three of the four days; the temperatures were warm for that time of year. All in all, it was just about perfect."
"Of all the tragedies my poor friend created for himself, leaving this book unfinished becomes the hardest one to bear."
"A promise is a promise, after all, and even though her silence wound up causing a lot of damage, I don’t think she was wrong to do what she did."
"Every time I tried to think about him, my imagination failed me."
"He felt as if his heart had been ripped out of him."
"No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth."
"This probably sounds vague, but I can’t do any better than that."
"Life is filled with disappointments, Mr. Mueller. And now if you don’t mind, I think it’s time for you to be on your way."
"We exist in the present only to the degree that we put our faith in the future."
"Neglect the children, and we destroy ourselves."
"Democracy is not a given. It must be fought for every day, or else we run the risk of losing it."
"Each person is alone, and therefore we have nowhere to turn but to each other."
"You’re only going to make things worse for yourself, Ben. The longer you keep it to yourself, the harder it’s going to be when you have to talk."
"I’m not tough, and I’m not good, and once you get to know me, you’ll wish you’d never set foot in this house."
"Frozen assets. Since you won’t tell me if you want the money or not, we’ll just put your future on ice."
"Early on, he decided that openness was the most useful strategy, the best way to avoid creating the wrong impression."
"Rather than skulk around and keep himself hidden, he chatted people up, he charmed them, he got them to think of him as an okay kind of guy."
"There was nothing to say that someone couldn’t pass by in those twenty minutes, but given the hour, and given the nature of those towns, the chances were slim."
"It was hard work, but after a year and a half, he hadn’t left a single trace behind him."
"I’m going to keep on giving them hell for as long as I can."
"You can hold your breath for just so long, after all."
"Sooner or later, a moment comes when you have to start breathing again—even if the air is tainted, even if you know it will eventually kill you."
"Because he missed me. He went away on a long trip and forgot to buy postcards. It was his way of staying in touch."