Ein bearbeiteter Beitrag vom Dezember 2011...

30 Days of Books

Day 1: Favorite book

Tag 6 - Ein Buch, das/aus dem du zitieren kannst.

• "People always think they know other people, but they don’t. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won’t eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don’t know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel fucked up and sad for not reason at all." (Libba Bray, Going Bovine)
• "I want to know you. You seem like someone worth knowing. Every day I feel like I’m surrounded by people with hard edges and sour faces but I get the sense that you’re different. Too often people seem to think that they have the answers to everything. Their faces are trapped in permascowls and they can’t be bothered with anything besides their own narcissism. You aren’t like that. You still ask questions. You’re still looking for the answers." (Ryan O’Connell, I Want to Know You)
• "You know someone’s right for you when the things they don’t have to say are even more important than the things they do." (Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home)
• "All the hardest, coldest people you meet were once as soft as water. And that’s the tragedy of living." (Iain Thomas, I Wrote This for You)
• "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." (Oscar Wilde)
• "Ich bekenne, ich brauche Geschichten, um die Welt zu verstehen." (Siegfried Lenz, Die Erzählungen)
• "Ich glaube an die Literatur, sonst hätte ich mein Leben verfehlt." (Michael Köhlmeier, Idylle mit ertrinkendem Hund)
• “Bücher sind kein Zeitvertreib. Sie handeln von anderen Leben. Anderen Welten. Man will sich ganz und gar nicht die Zeit vertreiben, [...], man wünscht sich im Gegenteil mehr davon.”
• "Kann es eine größere Freude geben", vertraute sie ihrem Tischnachbarn an,
  dem kanadischen Außenhandelsminister, "als auf eine Autorin zu stoßen, die einem gefällt, und dann herauszufinden, dass sie nicht bloß ein oder zwei Bücher, sondern mindestens ein Dutzend geschrieben hat?" (Beides aus: Alan Bennett; Die souveräne Leserin) 
• "It’s never been a perfect world. It’s never going to be. It’s going to be hard and scary, and if you’re lucky, wonderful and awe-inspiring. But you have to push through the bad parts to get to the good." (Carrie Ryan, The Dead-Tossed Waves)
• "If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged." (Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace)
• "We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple." (David Foster Wallace)
• "She longed to return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about." (Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse)
• "Life is getting crowed out altogether. But life hasn’t been very pleasant these days. Life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Still I think if I were a painter I should only need a brush dipped in dun colour to give the tone of those days." (Virginia Woolf)
• "Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?" (Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure)
• "Ich nahm das Buch und ließ die Seiten langsam an meinen Augen vorüberfächern. Wörter, weitläufig vertraut, aber schief und verdreht, wie Gesichter in einem Zerrspiegel, flogen vorüber und hinterließen auf der glasigen Oberfläche meines Hirns keinen Eindruck. […] Die Buchstaben bekamen Widerhaken und Widderhörner. Ich sah zu, wie sie auseinanderliefen, wie sie auf alberne Weise auf- und abwärtswackelten. Dann verbünden sie sich zu phantastischen, unübersetzbaren Gebilden, wie Arabisch oder Chinesisch." (Sylvia Plath, Die Glasglocke)
• "I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is." (Sylvia Plath)

• "People who have only good experiences aren’t very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren’t very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well—it’s easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don’t think you’re going to have a life like that, and I think you’ll be the better for it. The difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You must not let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift—a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless." (Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You)

30 Days of Books