Quotes By Letter: F

“Sara grew up to be a copy editor, a profession she compares to walking behind an elephant in a parade and scooping up what it has left on the road. Her prize find, to date, was a sentence in a manuscript for a San Francisco publisher: 'Einstein's Theory of Relativity led to the development of the Big Band Theory.' In her mind's ear, she still occasionally hears the strains of the cosmic orchestra.”

-Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman

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“And God is not a comfort, to be offered like Kleenex. God is a poisoned sea, with broken syringes washing up on the beach. God is shopping malls stretching to the horizon and warplanes in the sky. God is a flat tire in a rainstorm and beer cans in the ditch, a bottle shattered on a highway overpass and the taste of gunmetal in your mouth. God is dying children.”

-The Monk Downstairs, Tim Farrington

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“God is the nail that splits our palm to break our grip on the world. He is an unfathomable darkness. He's not what you want to hear.”

-The Monk Downstairs, Tim Farrington

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“There is a prayer that is simply seeing through yourself, seeing your own nothingness, the emptiness impervious to self-assertion. A prayer that is the end of the rope. A helplessness, fathomless and terrifying. Now matter how holy or well meaning you were when you started out, no matter how many fine experiences you had along the way, by the time you reach the point of this prayer, you want only to get out of it.

And God? God is that which will not let you out of it.”

-The Monk Downstairs, Tim Farrington

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“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.”

-As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

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“Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.”

-Marilyn Ferguson

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“It seemed I would not or could not catch up with her. As she walked, her shadow caught on a tree, fell to the ground and stretched, as if made of rubber bands, no china doll about to break, capable of stretching into any form I imagined, a cicada cry in her mouth.”

-Her, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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“There was no reality to pain when it left
one, though while it held one fast all other realities failed.”

-Rachel Field

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“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.”

-Harvey Fierstein

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“Self-improvement is masturbation, and self-destruction.”

-Fight Club [movie]

Recommended by brittany.

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“Please don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear, for I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks, masks that I'm afraid to take off and none of them are me. Pretending is an art that is second nature to me, but don't be fooled, for God's sake don't be fooled.

I give you the impression I'm secure and that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name, coolness my game, that water is calm and I'm in command and that I need no one, but don't believe me, please don't believe me.

My surface may be smooth, but my surface is a mask--my every varying and ever concealing mask. Beneath it dwells the real confusion, fear and aloneness. Beneath lies my smugness, my complacently, but I hide this--I don't want anyone to know it.

I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed. That's why I frantically created a mask to hide behind-- nonchalant sophisticated facades to help me pretend-- to shield me from the glance that knows-- but such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only salvation and I know it. That is if it's followed by acceptance. If it's followed by love, it's the only thing that can liberate me from myself, from my own self built prison walls and from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect. It's the only thing that will assure me of what I cannot assure myself, that I'm really worth while, but I don't tell you this, I don't dare--I'm afraid to.

I'm afraid that your glance will not be followed by acceptance and love. I'm afraid you'll think less of me and you'll laugh and your laugh will kill me. I'm afraid that deep down, I'm nothing and that I'm just no good and that you'll see this and reject me.”

-Don't Be Fooled by Me, Charles C. Finn

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“Nobody ever complained? Girls were kind. No one ever told him, I could barely stay awake. If only you'd come faster, I could have ignored it altogether. Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face, on a November day in the rain.”

-Paint it Black, Janet Fitch

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“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”

-White Oleander, Janet Fitch

Recommended by annalise.

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“How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much you could hold, how much you could care. ”

-White Oleander, Janet Fitch

Recommended by Shay.

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“I combed my hair and made a French twist, imagining myself as Olivia. I stalked the small room, walking the way she walked, hips first, like a runway model. What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism even to say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit into slots - prostitute, housewife, saint - like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”

-White Oleander, Janet Fitch

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“Having gone through unprofessional agonies during her long relapse following Topsy's birth, he had, perforce, hardened himself about her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well. This made it difficult now to distinguish between his self-protective professional detachment and some new coldness in his heart. As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect. One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”

-Tender Is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“His eyes were focused upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.It was a girl in a red negligé, silk surely, drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. ...He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful--then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever know.”

-The Beautiful And The Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”

-The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly.

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money - that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it...high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl.”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“'Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?'

'Very much.'

'It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about -- things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.'

'You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,' she went on in a convinced way. 'Everybody thinks so -- the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.' Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. 'Sophisticated -- God, I'm so sophisticated!'”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning --
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly with one another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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