Transit Quotes
"We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value."
"Only the very lucky and the very unlucky get an unmixed fate: the rest of us have to choose."
"People only want what it is not certain they can have."
"Finding and procuring a home was an intensely active state; and activity entails a certain blindness, the blindness of fixation."
"The worst possible thing for such a person was to quit the centre as an act of self-protection and take shelter in an aesthetic reality by which the outside world remained untransfigured."
"Whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us."
"We are so schooled in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical."
"The irony is that such people, while afraid of being original, were also obsessed with originality."
"It must be really strange, like seeing a part of yourself that's invisible."
"You can't stop people coming in, and you can't ask what's in it for you when they do."
"Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there."
"I love England," he said. "I love most the English cakes."
"The thing is, she said, I know what I want to write about. I just don’t know how to write it."
"Unlike their daughter, his wife could speak no English at all."
"People like you make me sick. The way people like you carry on."
"I take photographs of food," she said, "instead of eating it."
"For a long time she pretended that she couldn’t hear it, couldn’t feel it, but nonetheless her existence with Marc inexorably ground to a halt."
"It’s like there’s something she doesn’t know," she said, "because no one’s ever forced her to know it."
"I hear you stamping about," Paula said. "You probably don’t even take your shoes off."
"Freedom, I said, is a home you leave once and can never go back to."
"When you are afraid of something, that is the sign that it's something you must do."
"I suppose I see it all the time in my work, people wear things simply because they're in vogue."
"Maybe people run marathons to exercise their fantasies of running away."
"You don’t really think that, Amanda said, with a glimmer of interest in her red-rimmed eyes."
"It’s strange, how sometimes you can believe something to be true when in fact the exact opposite is the case."
"The problem was, the more complex he allowed his vision of life to become, the further he removed himself from his own capacity to act."
"But I didn’t care about it, she said. That’s the whole point."
"He did not, in other words, desire his lunch of smoked duck with the same mouth-watering blindness with which he had desired the processed cheese sandwich."
"What the cheese sandwich had represented was comfort, and once he had looked at it that way the whole can of worms was well and truly opened."
"Up to a certain point his whole life had been driven by needing things rather than liking them."
"To desire something better required self-control, required an acceptance of the fact that you might not have it forever."
"It left you alone with yourself, that desire, and when he thought about his life he saw it as a series of attempts to lose himself by merging with something else."
"Fate, he said, is only truth in its natural state."
"What mattered far more was to learn how to read that fate, to see the forms and patterns in the things that happened, to study their truth."
"You have to forget about the boys, he said. They'll take it all until there's nothing left."
"Fate is only truth in its natural state. When you leave things to fate it can take a long time, but its processes are accurate and inexorable."
"They should know the truth, he said. What does it matter if it’s a fake?"