The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories - Tolstoy

From "Family Happiness" -

"In the morning we were cheerful, at dinner polite, in the evening tender. 'Good!...' I said to myself, 'that's all very well, to do good and lead an upright life, as he says, but we've plenty of time for that, and there is something else for which I only have the energy now.' That was not what I needed, I needed strife; I wanted feeling to guide us in life, and not life to be the guide to feeling. I longed to go with him to the edge of a precipice and to say 'Another step, and I fling myself down! another movement and I am lost!' and for him, pale at the edge of the abyss, to snatch me up in his strong arms, hold me over it, so that my heart would stand still, and bear me away whither he would." (p.51)

"'What are you whispering today?' I asked.
He stopped, thought a little, and with a smile quoted the two lines of Lermontov -

'And in his madness prays for storms,
As though in storms he might find peace'"
(p. 55)

From "The Kreutzer Sonata"

"'No, I am speaking about the same thing, about the preference that one man or one woman has for one person above all others, and I simply ask, 'How long is this preference to last?''
'How long? why, sometimes it lasts a whole lifetime,' said the lady, shrugging her shoulders.
'Yes, but that is true only in novels, but never in real life. In real life this preference for one person rather than another may occasionally last for a year, more frequently it is measured by months, or even by weeks or days or hours,' said he, evidently knowing that he was surprising every one by his opinion, and well satisfied with it. ...
'Yes, I know,' ... 'You are speaking of what is supposed to exist, but I am speaking of what does exist. For every man feels for every pretty woman what you call love.'"
(p. 154)

"'Depravity does not lie in anything physical; depravity does not imply any physical deformity; depravity, genuine depravity, consist in freeing oneself from the moral relations to women with whom you enter into physical relations. And this emancipation I arrogated to myself as a virtue.'" (p. 158)

"'It is a marvelous thing how full of illusion is the notion that beauty is an advantage. A beautiful woman says all sorts of foolishness, you listen and you do not hear any foolishness, but what you hear seems to you wisdom itself. She says and does vulgar things, and to you it seems lovely. Even when she does not say stupid or vulgar things, but it simply beautiful, you are convinced that she is miraculously wise and moral.'"
(p. 163)

..tbc...

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"During the day, lying down to dream, he would secretly enjoy the memories of the night before ... he did not have to hide his tension, because that woman ... had nothing to do with the invisible power that taught him to breathe from within and control his own heartbeats, and that had permitted him to understand why men are afraid of death." (p. 29)

"'If I have to be something, I'll be a liberal,' he said, 'because conservatives are tricky." (p. 100)

"They enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed." (p. 345)

"A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity ... her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like." (p. 403)

"Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on Earth." (last page)

Anna Karenina - Tolstoy

"He could not have been mistaken. There were no other eyes in the world like those. There was no other being in the world capable of concentrating for him all the light and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He realized that she was driving to Yergushovo from the railway station. And all that had troubled Levin during that sleepless night, all the decisions he had taken, all of it suddenly vanished. He recalled with disgust his dreams of marrying a peasant woman. There, in that carriage quickly moving away and bearing to the other side of the road, was the only possibility of resolving the riddle of his life that had been weighing on him so painfully of late."
(p. 277)

"She loved him for himself and for his love of her. To possess him fully was a constant joy for her. His nearness was always pleasing to her. All the traits of his character, which she was coming to know more and more, were inexpressibly dear to her. ... Her admiration for him often frightened her: she sought and failed to find anything not beautiful in him. She did not dare show him her awareness of her own nullity before him. It seemed to her that if he knew it, he would stop loving her sooner; and she feared nothing so much now, though she had no reason for it, as losing his love." (p. 464)

"What he felt for this small being was not at all what he expected. There was nothing happy or joyful in this feeling; on the contrary, there was a new tormenting fear. There was an awareness of a new region of vulnerability. And this awareness was so tormenting at first, the fear lest this helpless being should suffer was so strong, that because of it he scarcely noticed the strange feeling of senseless joy and even pride he had experienced when the baby sneezed." (p. 719)

"But he needed only to go and stay for a while in Petersburg, in the circle to which he belonged, where people lived - precisely lived, and did not vegetate as in Moscow - and immediately all these thoughts vanished and melted away like wax before the face of fire. ...
Children? In Petersburg children did not hinder their father's life. Children were brought up in institutions, and there existed nothing like that wild idea spreading about Moscow ... that children should get all the luxuries of life and parents nothing but toil and care. Here they understood that a man is obliged to live for himself, as an educated person ought to live." (p. 729)

"Moreover, he felt vaguely that what he called his convictions were not only ignorance but were a way of thinking that made the knowledge he needed impossible.
...
The question for him consisted in the following: 'If I do not accept the answers that Christianity gives to the questions of my life, then which answers do I accept?' And nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer.
He was in the position of a man looking for food in a toymaker's or a gunsmith's shop.
Involuntarily, unconsciously, he now sought in every book, in every conversation, in every person, a connection with these questions and their resolution.
What amazed and upset him most of all was that the majority of people his age and circle, who had replaced their former beliefs, as he had, with the same new beliefs as he had, did not see anything wrong with it and were perfectly calm and content. So that, besides the main question, Levin was tormented by other questions: Are these people sincere? Are they not pretending? Or do they not understand somehow differently, more clearly, than he the answers science gives to the questions that concerned him?" (p. 786)

"He felt something new in his soul and delightedly probed this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.
'To live not for one's own needs but for God. For what God? For God. And could anything more meaningless be said than what he said? He said one should not live for one's needs - that is, one should not live for what we understand, for what we're drawn to, for what we want - but for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can either comprehend or define.'" (p. 795)

Survivor - Chuck Palahniuk

"'You don't know exactly when the fuel will run out. There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.'
And I yelled, So what else is new?
And, Tell me something I don't know."
(p. 285)

"My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground."
(p. 277)

"People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone."
(p. 275)

"Their way, everything in your life turns into an item on a list. Something to accomplish. You get to see how your life looks flattened out.
The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.
Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list."
(p. 269)

"For tear stains in a pillow case, treat them the same way you would a perspiration stain. Dissolve five aspirin in water and daub the stain until it's gone. Even if there's a mascara stain, the problem's solved.
If you could call it solved."
(p. 263)

"The look I'm going for is natural. Real. The look I'm after is, raw material. Not desperate and needy, but ripe with potential. Not hungry. Sure, I want to look like I'm worth the effort. Washed but not ironed. Clean but not polished. Confident but humble.
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine."
(p. 219)

"The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again.
The truth is you will be.
And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing.
Trust me on this."
(p. 162)

"Everything the agent's been telling me makes perfect sense. For instance, if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?
With all due respect.
According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get."
(p. 152)

"Around the one hundred and fifth floor, you can't believe you're the slave to this body, this big baby. You have to keep it fed and put it to bed and take it to the bathroom. You can't believe we haven't invented something better. Something not so needy. Not so time-consuming."
(p. 151)

"It's only in drugs and death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling"
(p. 151)

"Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished."
(p. 150)

"The agent's yelling that no matter how great you look, your body is just something you wear to accept your academy award.
Your hand is just so you can hold your Nobel Prize.
Your lips are only there for you to air-kiss a talk show host.
And you might as well look great."
(p. 150)

"Reality means you live until you die," the agent says. "The real truth is nobody wants reality." (p. 142)

""We all watch the same television programs," the mouth says. "We all hear the same things on the radio, we all repeat the same talk to each other. There are no surprises left. There's just more of the same. Reruns."
Inside the hole, the red lips say, "We all grew up with the same television shows. It's like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears."
...
"The big question people ask isn't 'What's the nature of existence?'" the mouth says. "The big question people ask is 'What's that from?'
(p. 111-110)

***i just noticed the pages are numbered backwards, so you know how many you have left instead of how far you've gone. interesting. especially since the whole book is about death.***

Atonement - Ian McEwan

"But hidden drawers, lockable diaries, and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: She had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. ... Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know." (p.5)

"She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge." (p.33)

"Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret." (p. 44)

"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back." (p. 72)

"Willing himself not to, he raised the book to his nostrils and inhaled. Dust, old paper, the scent of soap on his hands, but nothing of her. How had it crept up on him, this advanced stage of fetishizing the love object? ... He had spent three years drily studying the symptoms, which had seemed no more than literary conventions, and now, in solitude, like some ruffed and plumed courtier come to the edge of the forest to contemplate a discarded token, he was worshiping her traces - not a handkerchief, but fingerprints! - while he languished in his lady's scorn." (p. 79)

"The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation - it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him." (p. 85)

"But how to do feelings? All very well to write, She felt sad, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things." (p. 109)

"They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away." (p. 128)

"Nothing as singular or as important had happened since the day of his birth. She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty in a face which a lifetime's habit had taught her to ignore. She whispered his name with the deliberation of a child trying out the distinct sounds. When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word - the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different. Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same emphasis on the second word, as if she had been the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract." (p. 129)

"No one else knew she had a knack of keeping still, without even a book on her lap, of moving gently through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden. ... Fretting, concerned thought, reading, looking, wanting - all were to be avoided in favor of a slow drift of association, while the minutes accumulated like banked snow and the silence deepened around her." (p.141)

"Periodically, something slipped. Some everyday principle of continuity, the humdrum element that told him where he was in his own story, faded from his use, abandoning him to a waking dream in which there were thoughts, but no sense of who was having them. No responsibility, no memory of the hours before, no idea of what he was about, where he was going, what his plan was. And no curiosity about these matters." (p. 232)

"He laughed politely, though he must have thought me profoundly stupid. It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual." (p. 342)