Books Books and Quotes in a neat, categorized area for future reference.

“Really, when you talk about stars you’re speaking figuratively. That’s a metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You’re using a metaphor. Say: the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes a hard right to the chin and goes down, you say he’s seeing stars. Another metaphor. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.”

“we were fighting a class war. We weren’t in the same battle at all as the rest of the rebels. And they’d find that out soon enough.”

“He made his life up as he went along. He invented himself, and reinvented. He left a trail of Henry Smarts before he finally disappeared. Was he just a liar? No, I don’t think so. He was a survivor; his stories kept him going. Stories were the only things the poor owned. A poor man, he gave himself a life. He filled the hole with many lives.”

“When I was young, I wanted to believe in something good. And when that good thing started to go away, I still wanted to grab it, make it stay. Now I am a little more careful.”

“I would tell her, I loved you in ways you never saw. And maybe you do not believe this. But I know this is true, feel my heart. Because you broke my heart the hardest, and maybe I broke yours the same way.”

“That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love- that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more, maybe less, ten thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination- and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.”

“Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it- that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.”

“The past is gone, nothing to be done, just forget it. That’s what I tried to believe.”

“And Maybe we would have had difficulties in life, just like everyone, but not the kind that would make me hate myself and think that my own heart was my worst enemy.”

“We both won and we both lost, and I’m still not sure what our battle was.”

“An I feel guilty. It’s the same guilt I’ve felt before-when my father baptized me and I did not believe I was saved forever, when I took Communion and did no believe the grape juice was the blood of Christ, when I prayed along with others that a miracle would cure my father, when I already felt he had died long before.”

“It reminds me of a time when I was five years old, that age when anything was possible if you could just imagine it.”

“I wanted what had become impossible: I wanted to forget.”