Tao Lin, Richard Yates
All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
gimme,
Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
George Orwell, 1984
“and what i could be if there weren’t any other people living in the world.”
Vladimir Nabokov admired Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis. But he also saw some small ways to wordsmith the story, or at least the English translation of it. Above, we have some edits — the nips and tucks — that Nabokov scribbled on his personal copy of Kafka’s most famous work.
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. … [She] felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad of lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courtesan depositor of multiple desires. … She acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.
Anais Nïn, A Spy in the House of Love
the best first line of all, the one that never leaves me, light of my life, fire of my loins.
