Ernest Hemingway
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you will never get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
Betty Friedan
- The Feminine Mystique
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -- she was afraid to ask herself the silent question, "Is this all?"
Tim O'Brien
- How to Tell a True War Story
If at the end of a war story, you feel uplifted, or you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
William Faulkner
- The Sound and the Fury
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Ernest Hemingway
- A Moveable Feast
When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
Bobbie Ann Mason
- In Country
She was at the center of all of these impossible dramas, and somehow she was feeling that it was all up to her. But she didn't really know where she was, or who she would be if all those people left town and walked into the sunset to live happily ever after. If she got all of them straightened out, what would she do?
Betty Draper
- Mad Men
You're going to have a lot of first kisses. You're going to want it to be special so you'll remember. It's where you go from being a stranger to knowing someone. And every kiss with them after is a shadow of that kiss.
