Quotations
"The priest was young and seemed tired, not because of what had happened that night but because of something that had been wearing him down for years."
-Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

"But I was weary of myself, and weary of my lonely rooms; and I did my own errands, for no better reason than that it was something to do." -Wilkie Collins, Armadale

"The re-beginning of one's life, at the re-beginning of every day, has always been something weary and hopeless to me for years past." -Wilkie Collins, Armadale

"'"I felt weary, weary, done up, as if I hadn't had one hour's sleep since the day I was born."'" -Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

"Oh, cold world — I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms."
-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

"…And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood…" -Robert Frost, "Birches"

Quotations
"'I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me…'" -Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

"'As I read it I feel humbled and insignificant — which is good for me. I say to myself, "You poor, pitiful, little creature, did you ever imagine you could write? If so, your delusion is now stripped away from you for ever and you behold yourself in your naked paltriness." But I shall recover from this state of mind — and believe again that I can write a little — and go on cheerfully producing sketches and poems until I can do better.'" - L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

"'…I know it's good for me. Horrible things always are good for you, I suppose. After you've been killed a few times you don't mind it. But the first time one does — squirm.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

"'Cousin Jimmy thinks I did perfectly right. Cousin Jimmy would think I had done perfectly right if I had murdered Andrew and buried him in the Land of Uprightness. It's very nice to have one friend like that, though too many wouldn't be good for you.'"
-L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

"I used to read everything, Professor, I read all the time.  Now all I read is poetry.  Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.  I don't know if you follow me, Professor.  Only poetry — and let me be clear, only some of it — is good for you, only poetry isn't shit." -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

"She said gently: 'My dear, I'm trying to be good for you!'" -Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun

Quotations
"'...between them was a fathomless abyss which thought itself could not cross.'" -L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl

"When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn't cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance. A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down." -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

"He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. 'Fly, you fools!' he cried, and was gone." -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

"To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently." -Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Quotation
"My days were all alike, but they had something that today, in hindsight, I don't hesitate to call happiness." -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

Quotations
"…peaceful in a way that seemed to go beyond simple peacefulness, thought Fate, or maybe not, maybe her peacefulness was just peacefulness and a hint of weariness, peacefulness and banked embers, peacefulness and tranquility and sleepiness, which is ultimately (sleepiness, that is) the wellspring and also the last refuge of peacefulness. But then peacefulness isn't just peacefulness, thought Fate. Or what we think of as peacefulness is wrong and peacefulness or the realms of peacefulness are really no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending."
-Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

"When shall I finally untangle my thoughts, when shall I find peace and rest within myself again?" -Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

"'Yet surely I am not born to be for ever wretched; the time will come when' — She began to think she might one time be happy, but recollecting the desperate situation of Theodore, 'No,' said she, 'I can never hope even for peace!'" -Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest

"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose. Try it sometime." -J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

"'That's peace — real peace. To come to the end — not to have to go on….  Yes, peace…'" -Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

Quotations
"'We do things, say things, that later we regret with all our souls…'" -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

"I have made it a rule of my life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it. You can't get it into shape; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in. Looking back, of course, is equally fatal to Art. It's keeping yourself poor. Art can't and won't stand poverty." -Katherine Mansfield, "Je ne parle pas français"

"'I love that sound,' he mumbled into her hair. 'Blackbirds at dawn.'
'I hate it. Makes me think I've done something I'll regret.'" -David Nicholls, One Day

"To lie and regret the emergence from the womb as the umbilical cord is snipped, neatly, and the knot tied." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Laura: What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear.
-The Hours

Quotations
"…she felt so strong a distaste for her lonely, purposeless life that she was in no haste to go forth to meet another day of it." -L.M. Montgomery, "The Bride Roses"

"He also discovered that he was bitter and full of resentment, that he oozed resentment, and that he might easily kill someone, anyone, if it would provide a respite from the loneliness and rain and cold of Madrid, but this was a discovery that he preferred to conceal." -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

"There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of 'parties' with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering." -Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Quotations
"Calm is the one thing that will never let us down.  And Amalfitano said: everything else lets us down?  And the voice: yes, that's right, it's hard to admit, I mean it's hard to have to admit it to you, but that's the honest-to-God truth.  Ethics lets us down?  The sense of duty lets us down?  Honesty lets us down?  Curiosity lets us down?  Love lets us down?  Bravery lets us down?  Art lets us down?  That's right, said the voice, everything lets us down, everything.  Or lets you down, which isn't the same thing but for our purposes it might as well be, except calm, calm is the one thing that never lets us down, though that's no guarantee or anything, I have to tell you." -Roberto Bolaño, 2666, (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

"That calm acceptance went to my head at last. It fascinated me. It led me on and on till I threw every card that I possessed at him and sat back and watched him arrange them in his hand." -Katherine Mansfield, "Je ne parle pas français"

"…'Tis calm indeed! So calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness…." -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight"

"…Though forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen,
And mingle among the jostling crowd,
Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud—
I often come to this quiet place,
To breathe the airs that ruffle thy face,
And gaze upon thee in silent dream,
For in thy lonely and lovely stream
An image of that calm life appears
That won my heart in my greener years." -William Cullen Bryant, "Green River"

Quotation
"'That's just how it is here.  It's always sad at this time of day.  It's a goddamn landscape for women.'" -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

Quotation
"There's more to it than that, because words are everywhere, even in silence, which is never complete silence is it?" -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

Quotation
"'My predecessor was the one who knew most about all of this.  It took him seven years to get a general sense of what was going on.  Life is unbearably sad, don't you think?'" -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

Quotations
"…instead of the misery and disillusion of sixty odd years of mental vacuum, of physical squalor, I would spare them all by ending everything at the height of my so-called career while there were still illusions left among my profs, still poems to be published in Harper's, still a memory at least that would be worthwhile." -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

"But the peculiarity of these two strong memories is that each was very simple.  I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation.  I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture.  Perhaps this is characteristic of all childhood memories; perhaps it accounts for their strength.  Later we add to feelings much that makes them more complex; and therefore less strong; or if not less strong, less isolated, less complete." -Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past

"He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams." -Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

"Anyways, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions.  They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own.  They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive." -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

"Nothing told her anything, except one thing — unless she had lost her memory, she had lost her way." -Elizabeth Bowen, "The Inherited Clock"

"'…I shall sit with my memories. I expect to spend some time getting to know them.'" -Elizabeth Bowen, "The Inherited Clock"

"'People's memories are very short — a lucky thing, I always think.'" -Agatha Christie, "The Thumbmark of St. Peter"

"Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory." -James Joyce, "The Dead"

"No memory of the past touched him, for his mind was full of a present joy." -James Joyce, "A Little Cloud"

"He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him." -James Joyce, "A Painful Case"

"I liked the man. He was lean with memories." -Jack Kerouac, On the Road

"My memory is a goddamn liar." -Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment                                                                               of My Imagination

"It is only my memory that holds me here. Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together." -Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

"…It had been made for happy remembering
By people who were still too young
To have learned about memory…" -Ted Hughes, "A Short Film"

Random Musing
I don't think a post about "memory" would be complete without the following video:

Quotations
1. "'I don't have much time, I have to haul corpses.  I don't have much time, I have to breathe, eat, drink, sleep.  I don't have much time, I have to keep the gears meshing.  I don't have much time, I'm busy living.  I don't have much time, I'm busy dying.  As you can imagine, there were no more questions.'" -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

2. "'Why isn't the wind happy, Mummy?' asked Walter one night.
'Because it is remembering all the sorrow of the world since time began,' answered Anne." -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside

3. "'…I know it's good for me. Horrible things always are good for you, I suppose. After you've been killed a few times you don't mind it. But the first time one does — squirm.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

4. "'Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake — especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.'" -J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

5. "…and come back, come back, come back to me." -Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

6. "One can get over anything in time." -Katherine Mansfield, "The Canary"

7. "'It makes me very sad at times to think about her. But really, Marilla, one can't stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Random Musing
Sticking quotes #6 and #7 in there is kind of misleading. I don't feel that way. Not at all. That's just how I think I'll probably feel one day. Or how I hope I'll feel one day. That's "one day," not "right now." Right now I'm just hoping that I'll eventually get to a point where the world seems utterly interesting. Or even remotely interesting. Cause it doesn't right now. Instead it seems surreal and sad and inexplicable.

I guess what I'm saying is that what I find so awful about right now is that no matter what else is going on in life the one all-consuming feeling I have can essentially be summed up by:

                 "…wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad."

Quotations
"'Fear is the original sin,' wrote John Foster. 'Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading.'" -L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

"But while there was life there was fear." -L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

"He was afraid of the world. It was such a huge world and he was so terribly small in it." -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside

"You have to listen to women.  You should never ignore a woman's fears." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"'And after all, one does not die of it.' 'Die of what?' I asked swiftly. 'Of being afraid.'" -Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

"'It is natural to be afraid…'" -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

"…I will show you fear in a handful of dust…." -T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

"…I have to be protected
Because I am so afraid" -Dorothea Lasky, "Two Doors to Hell"

"…Live things are what the world is made of
Live things are black
Black in that they forget where they came from
I have not forgotten, however I choose not to feel
Those places that have burned into me
There is too much burning here, I'm afraid
Readers, you read flat words
Inside here are many moments
In which I have screamed in pain
As the flames ate me" -Dorothea Lasky, "Jakob"

Francesca: It isn't human not to be lonely and it isn't human not to be afraid.
-The Bridges of Madison County

Random Musing
I don't actually think you should fear me. I was just in the mood for theatrics. Felt I should explain that. Make sure you know I'm not going power hungry and losing my mind or anything. I just finished re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so I'm blaming the mood on a large dose of Voldemort.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Quotations
"'Look, do you see that poem?' she said suddenly, pointing." -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

"'I should rather call it a picture,' said Jane. 'A poem is lines and verses.'
'Oh dear me, no.' Anne shook her head with its fluffy wild cherry coronal positively. 'The lines and verses are only the outward garments of the poem and are no more really it than your ruffles and flounces are you Jane. The real poem is the soul within them…and that beautiful bit is the soul of an unwritten poem. It is not every day one sees a soul…even of a poem.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

"Everybody who has ever lived in the world and could string two rhymes together has written a poem on spring. It is the most be-rhymed subject in the world – and always will be, because it is poetry incarnate itself. You can never be a real poet if you haven't made at least one poem about spring." -L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

"I used to read everything, Professor, I read all the time.  Now all I read is poetry.  Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.  I don't know if you follow me, Professor.  Only poetry – and let me be clear, only some of it – is good for you, only poetry isn't shit." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"'To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion – a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.'" -George Eliot, Middlemarch

"'I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.'" -J.D. Salinger, "Teddy," Nine Stories

"…a poem is like a rare little watch: alter the delicate juxtaposition of cogs, and it just may not tick." -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

"For some reason, no one likes to be told that they do not read enough poetry…" -Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

Quotations
"For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…" -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"Fate imagined the masseur reading in a dark room and a shudder passed through him.  It must be something like happiness, he thought." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"'What a relief to give up literature, to give up writing and simply read!'" -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"Madeleine had become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read." -Jeffrey Eugenides, "Extreme Solitude"

Quotations
"'I wonder why people so commonly suppose that if two individuals are both writers they must therefore be hugely congenial,' said Anne, rather scornfully. 'Nobody would expect two blacksmiths to be violently attracted towards each other merely because they were both blacksmiths.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

"But there is a destiny which shapes the ends of young misses who are born with the itch for writing tingling in their baby fingertips…" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

"Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"These weren't comforting nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature.  That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, after fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives.  Fear of being no good.  Also fear of being overlooked.  But above all, fear of being no good.  Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing.  Fear of the step that leaves no trace.  Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints.  Fear of the dining alone and unnoticed.  Fear of going unrecognized.  Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself.  But above all, fear of being no good.  Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"Play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers.  Also: the promise of their future happiness." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"…You wanted to be a writer.
Wanted to write? What was it within you
Had to tell its tale?…" -Ted Hughes, "The God"

Quotations
"'The p'int of good writing is to know when to stop.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

"The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well on could write if one really wanted to or had the time." -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

"Writing sharpens life; life enriches writing." -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

"When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference." -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

"…Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty.  There's nothing in the guts of a the man who sits there writing." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me – the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, 'My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.'
Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world, 'Come and catch me if you can.' And so, led on by this will-o'-the-wisp, they flounder through volume after volume, spending the best years of their lives in the pursuit, and receiving for the most part very little cash in exchange. Few catch the phantom; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair." -Virginia Woolf, "Character in Fiction"

Quotations
"'Going out – out beyond the dawn. Past the morning star. Used to think I'd be frightened. Not frightened. Funny. Think how much I'm going to know – in just a few more minutes, Emily. Wiser than anybody else living. Always wanted to know – to know. Never liked guesses. Done with curiosity – about life. Just curious now – about death. I'll know the truth, Emily – just a few more minutes and I'll know the – truth. No more guessing.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

"'I don't want to die now!' he yelled.  'I've still got a headache!  I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!'" -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"'I'll never die,' the baroness said once to Archimboldi.  'Or I'll die at ninety-five, which is the same as never dying.'" -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die – and soon', then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first." -George Eliot, Middlemarch

"…Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
     I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
     To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,..." -John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"

Quotations
"One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"The priest was young and seemed tired, not because of what had happened that night but because of something that had been wearing him down for years." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"'I'm just tired of everything…even of the echoes. There is nothing in my life but echoes…echoes of lost hopes and dreams and joys. They're beautiful and mocking.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea