50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Category: Quite Quotable (Page 4 of 23)

December 3, 2018 /

“If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we’re all addicted and we can’t break the habit now. There’s not even anything very twentieth century about it, except the disposition. You just can’t kick it, that junk, even if you want to. You can’t get the money monkey off your back.”

—from Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis

November 30, 2018 /

“Should the earth enter turnaround tomorrow, nuke out, commit suicide, then we’ll already have our suicide notes, pain notes, dolour bills—money is freedom. That’s true. But freedom is money. You still need money.”

—from Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis

November 26, 2018 /

“Money is the only thing we have in common. Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re just suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.”

—from Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis

November 19, 2018 /

“Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It’s passing, yet I’m the one who is doing all the moving. I’m not the station, I’m not the stop: I’m the train. I’m the train.”

—from Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis

November 16, 2018 /

“What is this state, seeing the difference between good and bad and choosing bad—or consenting to bad, okaying bad?”

—from Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis

November 12, 2018 /

“In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They’re like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them at some time, with or without the talent. We all write them in our heads.”

—from Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis

November 5, 2018 /

“‘Where there is real love between people, as there was between all of us, then the details don’t matter. Love is more important than the flesh and blood facts of who gave birth to whom.'”

—from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

November 2, 2018 /

” . . . Elizabeth was struck, not for the first time, by the thought that her life was entirely frivolous.

It was a rush and slither of trivial crises; of uncertain cash-flow, small triumphs, occasional sex and too many cigarettes; of missed deadlines that turned out not to matter; of arguments, new clothes, bursts of altruism and sincere resolutions to address the important things.”

—from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

October 29, 2018 /

“It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps, the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marveled in later life were not really isolated at all; perhaps they were the natural continuation of the innocent goodness that all people brought into the world at their birth. If this was true, then his fellow-human beings were not the rough, flawed creatures that most of them supposed. Their failings were not innate, but were the result of where they had gone wrong or been coarsened by their experiences; in their hearts they remained perfectible.”

—from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

October 22, 2018 /

“At first he thought the war could be fought and concluded swiftly in a traditional way. Then he watched the machine gunners pouring bullets into the lines of advancing German infantry as though there was no longer any value accorded to a mere human life. He saw half his platoon die under the shells of the enemy’s opening bombardment. He grew used to the sight and smell of torn human flesh. He watched the men harden to the mechanical slaughter. There seemed to him a great breach of nature which no one had the power to stop.”

—from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

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