In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd by Ana Menendez

"And then she would smile and tilt her head back, and her laughter connected him again to that night, made him believe for a moment that life was a string you could gather up in your hands all at once."

A Complicated Kindess by Miriam Toews

"My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit right back out of him and filled the silent parts of their lives with books and coffee and other things."

"The gap between our feelings, his and mine, on that particular point was immeasurable."

"It may have been the light at 5:36 on a June evening or it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water or the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I'll kill you but suddenly it was like I was dying, the way I missed her."

"Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together."

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered."

"What we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years."

"With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other."

"The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last -- the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."

"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."

"We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives."

"And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night - every night, every night - the moment I feigned sleep."

"in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead."

"and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands, and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D. - and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else."

"I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine."

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

"The sound of the horses like roses being burned alive."

"Facts are bigger in the dark."

"Spirit rules secretly alone the body achieves nothing."

The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes

"emotion is even, perhaps, the slyest of losses."

A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco

"Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all."

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

"It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands."

"and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

This Isa Nice Neighborhood by Farid Matuk

"We all joined the astronaut corps and are waiting in line for the moon."

"I'm sorry you have to leave Mexico, that's how much I love you."
- Tallying Song 2.13.2008

Read it here

Bolinas Journal by Joe Brainard

"A little girl wants a quarter. Giving her a nickel she mumbles "motherfucker" and walks away."

"We were talking about life yesterday, Bill and I (yes, life) and Bill was saying how his idea of being happy was to spend the whole day in bed with someone. (Me too)."

I Remember by Joe Brainard

"I remember how much rock and roll music can hurt. It can be so free and sexy when you are not."

"I remember how disappointing going to bed with one of the most beautiful boys I have ever seen was."

"I remember those times of not knowing if you feel really happy or really sad. (Wet eyes and a high heart.)"

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

"It is not nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue."

"A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute.
No more."

"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice"

Red Wind by Raymond Chandler

"I sipped my drink. I like an effect as well as the next fellow. Her eyes ate me."

"She wasn't beautiful, she wasn't even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was."

Read it here

Steps by Frank O'Hara

"all I want is a room up there
and you in it"

"oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much"

Read it here

Equinox by Lorenzo Thomas

"If this is solace,
   These men standing
up against the wall
These are the guardians
Of future pathways –"


"Talking together as gray-haired men
   with the guy
You looked up at the stars with
When you were boys

And wondering if there's a God
   a girl, a goal
A meaning to the universe
& knowing now
   you really do not know much more
Than you did back then,"

"A boy's job
To listen to the old men's lies
And learn the music . . ."

Read it here

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."

"Divorces are made in Heaven."

"More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read."

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

"They were bums and they were hungry and they didn't have talent for song-making. All they had in the world was the nerve to stand in a back yard with cap in hand and sing loudly. The sad thing was in the knowing that all their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were lost as all people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over and even though the sun is still bright, it is thin and doesn't give you warmth when it shines on you."

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered -- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure..."

"And look at me, Little Igor, the bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive in life is something you have earned."

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

"I thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables. I thought about my small victories and everything I'd seen destroyed, I'd swum through mink coats on my parents' bed while they hosted downstairs, I'd lost the only person I could have spent my only life with, I'd left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, and how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless."

"I hope you never love anything as much as I love you."

"In the end, everyone loses everyone."

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."

"Held in the palm of our half hour together were one hundred million arguments, and impossible admissions, and silences."

"I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room, ended our suffering, they would have found us floating face-down in two thousand white pages, or buried under the salt of my evaporated tears."

"I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her."

"Years were passing through the spaces between moments."

"I heard the roar of that baby's silence."

"Can lions love?"

"How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?"

"On a frozen shelf, in a closet frozen shut, is a can with a voice in it."

"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on ... I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you."

"It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?"

"Lovers pulled up each other's underwear, button each other's shirts, and dressed and dressed and dressed."

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

"There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find the sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing -- not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past."

"I promise to tell you how one falls in love."

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves ... We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."