Great Quotes From Great Novels

Page 12

"Reading is a bit like hallucinating."

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"Hello, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfill. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, regardless of how much you hope."

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"Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow."

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"Some memories refuse to be locked in time or place, they are always present."

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"I guess children believe whatever they want to believe. Perhaps adults do too."

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"I should write about why he left.

But there are different versions of truth. If we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speeds. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time. Truth changes."

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"Writing about the past is a way of reliving it, a way of seeing it unfold all over again. We place memories on pieces of paper to know they will exist. But this story has never been a keepsake - it's finding a way to let go."

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"He repeated the story he liked to tell us. The one with the small boy who was trying to lift a rock in his garden, and the boy's dad was watching him heave and sweat and struggle, but get nowhere. Eventually the dad asks, 'Why don't you use all of your strength?' And the boy says, 'I am, Daddy. I am using all of my strength.' And his dad says, 'No you're not. You haven't asked me for help.'"

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"Once upon a time, we buried the memories we didn't want."

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"Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps us forever trapped by the pain of our own minds."

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"When she turned to see me smiling. It was an awkward smile, but you only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expected it to be."

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"Some things are too big. Any punishment is an insult to the crime."

~The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer