Thursday Quotables is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week. Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written. Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines will be, and you’re invited to join in! Created by Lisa, over at Bookshelf Fantasies, and joined in by, well, me!
If you want to check out some of my other favourite quotes – CLICK HERE.
I read A Little Life in 2020, and it’s one of the few books that I find myself thinking about long after finishing it. Although I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone, it’s an incredible piece of literature- designed to gut punch and leave you breathless pretty much every time you turn a page. Be aware though, the handbook for trigger warnings would be another 400 page read!
Anyway, here are a few quotes I highlighted in this 720 page monster when I last read it:
“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving- and then to appreciate them for what they are can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad — or good — it might be, and to trust them. Which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
“But he also realized that the drugs had been protecting him, and without them, the hyenas returned, less numerous and more sluggish, but still circling him, still following him, less motivated in their pursuit but still there, his unwanted but dogged companions.”
“Always, he wonders why and how he has let four months — months increasingly distant from him — so affect him, so alter his life. But then, he might as well ask — as he often does — why he has let the first fifteen years of his life so dictate the past twenty-eight.”
“That he can walk through SoHo and no one will know who he is. But really, he is a prisoner: of his job, of his relationship, and mostly, of his own wilful naivete.”