Quotes from Arthur Phillips

How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch up.

But the reality of power—a field of study Ezzedine had ignored, even as he benefited from it—could not be denied infinitely. He would be subject to its immutable laws whether he studied them or pretended they didn't exist.

If music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption.

Perhaps men could accustom themselves to living with a small amount of doubt. I think doubt a necessary ingredient to live.

If I were a better version of me, I would not react faster than I think, would not be wounded when no harm was intended, would understand before too much time had passed to forgive...

The memoir industry is, what's the word? Under regulated. I think it needs to be pruned. If there are too many books right now and the market for readers is shrinking, I think we can get rid of many of the memoirs. Another memoir should be awfully well justified before it gets published.

Maria, groaning for scraps, would drape his head on my feet as I ate, trying to camouflage himself as my napkin or the rug.

he] understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two.

says the brave and tearful mother hustled over from subconscious central casting when recollection fails.

the orange circle faded to a coiled spring of dully glowing grey.

He might say he had made a mistake in moving to this foreign city—it had seemed like a good idea in California, but now where else could he go?

he] understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling of taking the wrong things seriously.

Charles Gabór sits with four other westerners, an unlikely group pieced together these past few weeks from parties and family references, friend-of-friend-of-friend happenstance, and (in one case, just now being introduced) sheer, scarcely tolerable intrusiveness--five people who, in normal life back home, would have been satisfied never to have known one another.

and when he finally did break, he would take with him his contagious restlessness and dissatisfaction and guilt, his little gestures and phrases and attitudes that stank of their parents and the past, and Scott would relax again and prove to himself that he had settled all that, left if far below him.

Are you still awake?' he might ask in the intimate whisper of 3 a.m. lovers who half arise, warm and happy, to find they have been in someone's company during all those lost hours of sleep.

He would tell himself he had momentarily gone mad and forgotten why he existed. Do not forget again and you will never feel so lost again, he would remind himself, confident in his memory's ability to be permanently fixed.

John understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling, of taking the wrong things seriously.

Christian kingdoms hate one another and are divided on how best to show their love for Jesus Christ. How mad, you think, to hate over how best to love.

There is no grand scheme of things. That's just a bullshit disguise for cowards. The present has no right to judge the past. Or to act in order to win the future's approval.' (Todd, the marine)

Matthew Thatcher, in his first year at the hall, had drawn and written guides for the cooks and boys, so that all the baron's people were, with much effort, brought up to the level of knowledge equal to that of a juvenile squirrel.

Nádja was off again, in rare and wondrous form, bewitching her audience with another recollection, exquisitely told, satisfying in its construction, lyrical and glamorous, slightly improbably but nowhere near impossible. And John did not doubt its probability. Lives like Nádja's must exist; he had read enough to know this was true.

The most important day of your life, a wonderful moment, but know it as it happens, you feel like God himself is holding you up in his hand. (Imre)

Unrequited love is not fatal, it's just a temporary digestive disorder that leaves no visible marks, only a newly acquired but permanent inability to ever eat certain specific, unnecessary things again without having terrible digestive distress. Shrimp gives me gas, so I don't eat shrimp. I don't sit up nights crying about shrimp, right? All right then. Have two aspirin and a full glass of water, remember?

There was probably a range of people she had never experienced in this world and for which she had no preparation