coffeeandirony.org » literary quotes http://coffeeandirony.org Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:54:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Quotidian http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/11/03/quotidian-32/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/11/03/quotidian-32/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:59:00 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=2411 “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”

-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/11/03/quotidian-32/feed/ 0 magic Quotidian http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/10/04/quotidian-31/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/10/04/quotidian-31/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:24:21 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=2222 “We live in a tired world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning—by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos—are obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest….  [T]he lovely lines of faith that sprung up in aspiring  towers of the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time, and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress….  [T]he Scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in that greed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur.”

-A.S. Byatt, Possession

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/10/04/quotidian-31/feed/ 0 Life is Beautiful http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/09/30/life-is-beautiful-13/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/09/30/life-is-beautiful-13/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:17:53 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=2219 park bench reading

“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality — the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.”

-Arthur Christopher Benson

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/09/30/life-is-beautiful-13/feed/ 0 park bench Quotidian http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/06/29/quotidian-24/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/06/29/quotidian-24/#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:40:11 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=2013 No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/06/29/quotidian-24/feed/ 0 Quotidian http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/06/11/quotidian-23/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/06/11/quotidian-23/#comments Sat, 11 Jun 2011 18:16:41 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=1949 “You know you’ve been out of the South too long when you’re cruising in the lazy-making sunshine down a road so flat the land seems to have stretched itself out for a nap, somewhere between Faulkner’s home and Elvis’s grave, and still you can’t help but creep up on the slowpoke ahead until you’re close enough to read bumper stickers going all the way back to the first Bush. And you know you’ve been in New York too long when, at the first chance, you crank the wheel, swerve out, and gun it.”

-Josh Weil, “Ode to a Mississippi Patrolman”

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/06/11/quotidian-23/feed/ 0 Quotidian http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/04/27/quotidian-22/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/04/27/quotidian-22/#comments Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:49:39 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=1857

“It seemed unreasonable, unfair, that a woman so young and beautiful should be so exhausted. Of course, it was neither unreasonable nor unfair. Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.”

-Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance (1994)

 

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/04/27/quotidian-22/feed/ 0 horriblecherry Quotidian http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/02/07/quotidian-19/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/02/07/quotidian-19/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:32:28 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=1607 “There was a bakery in Raheny guarded by two women. It had the best smell of any shop. It wasn’t bread; it wasn’t a rushing smell, like steam surrounding you. It was quieter, part of the air, not warm and smothering and upsetting. The smell made me feel good. The cakes were on shelves inside the all-glass counter, not stacks of them, a few of each on plates two feet apart down the shelves; small cakes, not huge things exploding with cream. The cakes were bright, hard in a nice way – biscuits that were too good to be called biscuits. Like cakes in a fairy tale; you could have built things out of them.”

-Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Roddy Doyle

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/02/07/quotidian-19/feed/ 0 Quotidian http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/01/31/quotidian-18/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/01/31/quotidian-18/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:14:43 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=1578 Perhaps this trauma of separation-beginning from our very birth-is the normal sequence of things and to detach oneself, to learn to move freely about the world without longings or inventions, takes years of patient learning; and even then we may turn one day and find the years hollowing a dark canyon beneath us.
-Loving Che, Ana Menendez

Every very day is a battle for independence and a grounded approach to life. – I Wynn

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/01/31/quotidian-18/feed/ 0 Quotidian http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/01/21/quotidian-17/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/01/21/quotidian-17/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 04:23:36 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=1574 Falling in love with Zadie Smith:

“It’s about time someone told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as once was supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots…[and] before Clara was beautiful she was ugly” – White Teeth

]]> http://coffeeandirony.org/2011/01/21/quotidian-17/feed/ 0 Quoditian http://coffeeandirony.org/2010/12/20/quoditian/ http://coffeeandirony.org/2010/12/20/quoditian/#comments Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:53:41 +0000 Claire http://coffeeandirony.org/?p=1463 “None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it in a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her.”

-Brooklyn, Colm Toibin

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