Jack: I might be in love with another woman. Miles Raymond: In love? Really? 24 hours with some wine-pourer chick and you're fucking in love? Come on! And you're gonna give up everything? Jack: Here's what I'm thinking: you and me, we move up here, w...
Kay Eiffel: [Penny goes to answer phone] Don't answer that! Penny Escher: Didn't you say this phone never r - ? Kay Eiffel: Shh! [types another sentence; the phone rings and she runs to answer it] Kay Eiffel: Hello? Harold Crick: Is this Karen Eiffel...
Penny Escher: [sitting on bench under an umbrella] May I ask what we're doing out here? Kay Eiffel: [sitting next to Penny without an umbrella] We're imagining car wrecks. Penny Escher: I see. And we can't imagine car wrecks inside? Kay Eiffel: No. D...
[Lamia is about to cut out Yvaine's heart] Tristan: Yvaine, hold me tight and think of home. [Tristan lights his Babylon candle. They escape, but end up on a cloud in the middle of nowhere] Tristan: What the hell did you do? Yvaine: What did *I* do? ...
Katerina Cavalieri: I heard you met Herr Mozart. Antonio Salieri: News travels fast in Vienna. Katerina Cavalieri: And he's been commissioned to write an opera. Is it true? Antonio Salieri: Yes. Katerina Cavalieri: Is there a part in it for me? Anton...
Jesse: So what kind of songs do you write? I didn't know you did that. Celine: What kind? Jesse: Yeah, sure. Celine: I don't know, just songs. Jesse: Like? Celine: Like, some are about, you know, people, uh, relationships. One's about my cat. Jesse: ...
...we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where w...
The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or s...
He seems so frivolous and so careless, but he gives money to beggars, not frivolously or carelessly, but because he believes in giving money to beggars, and giving it to them “where they stand”. He says he knows perfectly well all the arguments a...
Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpin...
An enlightened man had but one duty--to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led. The realization shook me profoundly, it was the fruit of this experience. I had often speculated with images ...
So they gave me love in form of poison and tiny little pills, programming my emotions, teaching me how to feel. To act correct and talk correct and answer without knowing the question, because that, my dear, is how you get love. Yes that, dear youth,...
There is a certain kind of man who is forever searching. He wanders from place to place, he looks hard into the eyes of women and men in every town, maybe he scratches the earth or wields a gun, remedies illnesses or writes books, and there is always...
So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l...
My father spent a long time looking at The Book of Summers, turning each page with solemnity. I watched him, seeing it all again through his eyes. A world that he was never a part of, one that I’d purposefully kept hidden from him, thinking that it...
I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: ‘A Stronger Loving World'. To the only panel he's circled. Oscar-who never defaced a book in his life-circled one panel three times in the same emphati...
During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of tha...
I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there’s a little fire burning in there, a f...
On the other side of that big-ass mirror, a video camera was watching us. In about ten seconds, it was going to start spitting static at itself, and everything it saw was going to break up into a fuzzy, gray-white wash, rolling up and down, that woul...
The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with deep contentment, as if this was the only condition for...
We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then w...
