“aku tak habis mengerti, mengapa orang-orang gampang sekali mengata-ngatai pemerintah. Kalau bicara, sekehendak hatinya saja. Apa mereka kira gampang mengelola negara? Mengurusi ratusan juta manusia? Yang semuanya tak bisa diatur. Kalau mereka sendiri yang disuruh mengurusi negara, takkan becus juga!”
“Isn t post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?”
“She couldn’t read his expression. As he started toward her, she recalled the way he’d seemed to glide through the sand the first time she’d ever seen him; she remembered their kiss on the boat dock the night of his sister’s wedding. And she heard again the words she’d said to him on the day they’d said good-bye. She was besieged by a storm of conflicting emotions—desire, regret, longing, fear, grief, love. There was so much to say, yet what could they really begin to say in this awkward setting and with so much time already passed?”
“Our books are the deepest glimpses into our souls, the most raw and real anybody will ever find us.”
“Her dad must be a big guy. He pictured a muscular man with a baseball hat on backwards, smoking a cigarette, and drinking a bottle of Wild Turkey while watching underground cockfighting tapes.”
“فكَّرتُ أنني أستطيع أن أخلق مشهداً ملحميّاً ابتداءً من جورب معلّق على حبل غسيل. لا سحرة ولا غجر ولا بطريرك ولا جنرالات ولا شيء، ولا حتى مدينة متخيَّلة أو قرن يمر على العائلة الموصوفة. لا شيء من كل هذا. فقط جوارب، والأرجح أنها مخططة و.. مبللة. ”
“Jika ada hal lain yang sangat menakjubkan di dunia ini selain cinta, adalah sepakbola.”
“only a handful of pregnant women are like Emily; that is, they go to the hospital with pain and get the surprise of their life by delivering a child. Using Emily’s least-favorite math term, decimals, the number would be 0.0004 percent of all U.S. births. About fifteen hundred surprise babies a year.”
“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is So it goes.”
“And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.”
“Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers. Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey s Scotch and Poodle s cocaine.”
“He who spends too long regretting his ruined crop will be neglect to plant next year s harvest.”
“And they...LIVED! Life isn t always ‘Happily Ever After’, rather, loving FOREVER, regardless.”
“ لم يُكتب قط نصٌ في الدنيا إلا وكان له موسيقاه الخلفية.”
“الناس يعتزون دوما بما يجدون أنفسهم فيه ويفتخرون بما لا يختارون”
“A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.”
“People snare when I tell them that I’m an emotional prostitute. But after my rebuttal, they begin to realize that they are one too. Like me, they have pimped their emotions for the affections of another. Like me, they’ve gone through life tormented by the idea of living a happily ever after, not realizing that the ever after isn’t so happy.”