Quotes from Jonathan Lee

He is wearing the better of the two worst shirts his third-favorite brother let him borrow.

You look good. Not because of that designer bag you carry, That designer bag looks good because of you.

Praise and censure went down exactly the same drain, though he [Andrew Haswell Green] admittedly preferred the friendly trickle of the former.

At a certain age we forget to be afraid of people. We start to dread, instead, their absence.

The real cruelty of dying was not the way your own obscene dreams went gray. It was the fact that you lost the chance to tell your story.

life amounts, above all else, to the recruiting of witnesses.

Two errors, wrote Pascal, a thinker Andrew once admired. One: to take everything literally. Two: to take everything spiritually.

New York didn't set out to charm you. It was like God that way. You had to bring a lot of the enthusiasm yourself.

The rich leapt over suspicious puddles in their beautiful clothes. Up and down they strolled, no discernible destination in mind, and that, he [Andrew Haswell Green] decided, must be a thing that money can buy: the freedom from needing direction.

An alleyway is a disappointed road, waiting for someone to widen it.

the embrace—one that seems to lack a center. A feeling of being held only by the very edges of who you are. Of wanting, so intensely, to be brought into the heart.

You probably won't understand this precisely now, but knowledge and experience not only shapes people—it can also wall them off. Once they believe they have figured it all out, acquired a worldview and come to trust their choices to an overarching meta-narrative, anything which questions that set of operating premises is perceived as a nuisance—if not an outright threat.

A man dies at twenty and it is a great shame. He dies at thirty or forty and he has been taken from us too soon. But if one reaches the age of eighty-three, all the shock eventually begins to flow the other way, even in a murder case. The chief question becomes: How on earth did he survive so long?

Eighty-three years old. A lifetime of being a bachelor. This extended life of aloneness might have an effect on a man's character, might it not? Independence might have rusted into obstinacy.

There was no satisfying explanation for why Andrew [Haswell Green] and Samuel [Tilden] found themselves falling into a friendship. It was simply a matter of attraction, and instinct, and need, as it always is. Those factors and a hundred tiny, meaningless conversations that gradually accumulated into layers of familiarity.

He [Andrew Haswell Green] wanted to say, Don't go, but he still did not know how. To open himself up to a hard, hurtful truth again seemed the very worst of options. Some people are perhaps meant to live alone.

We find, over time, the deepness of a thing. And if we fail to find it, then we invent it, to show ourselves we are not shallow.

New York is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.

Andrew [Haswell Green]...thought of his impending travel on the brig. Of Samuel Tilden. Of why the friendship had vanished, the errors he must have made, too many signs of affection, or of desperation, neediness, the most appalling of all impressions to make on a fellow man. His only available course now was to put distance between his failures and his future, tighten the stranglehold on his feelings, and harden his heart protectively against the pain of further great mistakes.

I believe that one can never be an elegant man without a taste for reading.

It was funny how your whole past came into play as you worked toward a future. The concert of barely connected moments that make up any life. No one experience can be unlinked from the next. There were times when his [Andrew Haswell Green's] own past lives were the only ghosts he needed to visit for advice.

He...wondered if his own occasional doubts about the existence of God might in some way be mutual. Did anyone in the heavens really believe in him, Andrew Green, this awkward boy below, his spirit, his potential for good? His own question frightened him into muteness, the kind of silence the living rarely know, the moon hanging sullied by smoke in the sky, filthy with the expulsions of men.

jedna delicja nie zaspokaja naszego apetytu w sposób, w jaki niemal zawsze robi to jeden kawaÅ'ek ciasta

There would be better years. It would take a long time to swim toward them. He wasn't sure, at first, that he had the energy. The breakthrough was realizing that there would be days when he did and days when he didn't, days to avoid the water at all costs and days to dive in, bold.