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21 " The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together... Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. "
― Brian Morton , Starting Out in the Evening
22 " The thing is to let life assault you, make yourself as defenseless as you can. If it bruises you, don't protest. Love your fate. "
23 " A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe—nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life. "
24 " You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years. "
25 " ...life brings you everything at once. You can be in misery because of the misery of your daughter at the same time as you're exhilarated by a new romance, a romance that feels like the first act of anew life. "
― Brian Morton , Breakable You
26 " So much of human life is animal life: we respond to each other as animals. "
27 " So you can keep going. You can stay young. There's no inevitable law of diminishment: everyone who fades fades for his own reason. "
28 " Subtlety and indirection are important tools, but you can't scale the highest peaks with these tools alone. "
29 " It's foolish to speak of your happiness before you're sure you have it. "
30 " A man can't understand how a woman feels--how she can offer up her entire life to him. The man thinks she's bringing him a burden. He doesn't understand that she's trying to give him a gift. "
31 " ...they hadlived, they'd lived intensely. But no matter how deeply you live, it comes to this in the end: one of you will be gone and the other will be in mourning. "
32 " There are certain situations in which you can't convey what you mean. Words don't always work. "
33 " His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation. "
34 " It's probably true that you're forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make, but there are some moments in which this is more clear than in others. "
35 " Life takes place in restaurants. "
36 " It wasn’t that she wanted to seduce him—not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people—male or female—was one of the supreme pleasures of life. "
37 " People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again? "
― Brian Morton , Florence Gordon
38 " Coincidence. But the eagerness to find meaning in such coincidences is love. "
39 " Take the risk that you’ll end up regretting your speech, because it’s better than regretting your silence. "
40 " What appalled Schiller about these libraries was that they featured nothing off the beaten track: no tattered paperbacks; no evidence of distinctive personal interests; no tokens of long intellectual detours passionately explored. "