when you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.

Don Delillo

Underworld 

when one man, for whatever reason, has an opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.


Jacques Cousteau 

i saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. from the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. one fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was ee gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was europe and africa and south america, and another fig was constantin and socrates and attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs i couldn't quite make out. i saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs i would choose. i wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.


Silvia Plath
The Bell Jar

once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. 


Nicole Krauss
The History of Love

poets are always taking the weather so personally. they're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions. 


J.D Salinger
Nine Stories (Teddy)

it just goes to show you, how when two people spend time apart, they can be thinking in completely opposite directions and coming to radically different conclusions and forming geometrically opposed interpretations about the same events that transpired between then and - all the while - feel they've arrived at some mutual understanding.


Ethan Hawk
Ash Wednesday 

some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of st. james's park on a fine morning. 

Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway