The Infinite Library

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.”

“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.”

“No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.”

“Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”

“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”

“The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.”

“I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”

“I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.”

“Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.”

“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.”

“Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action.”

“Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.”

“With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”

“In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.”

“It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.”

“That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.”

“The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.”

“Somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once.”

“Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.”

“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”

“This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.”

“Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.”

“It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”

“Person A understand Person B because the time is right for that to happen, not because Person B wants to be understood by Person A.”

“Las cosas fluyen hacia donde tienen que fluir, y por más que te esfuerces e intentes hacerlo lo mejor posible, cuando llega el momento de herir a alguien lo hieres. La vida es así.”

“I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.”