Chris Lavergne Avatar

Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
View Tags View People

4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“Narratives in which one thing follows from the previous thing are usually imaginary.”
— Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
Tagged: Narrative Fallacy
“You are ancient ideas in a mortal body.”
— Nikita Gill, If You Are Still Fighting But Losing Hope, Read This
Tagged: History Within Us, You Are The Universe, Conservation, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“This is a confession: I love you. Last Sunday in church— bad you, who refused to come to see our beautiful new windows!— only last Sunday, my dear one, when I asked the Lord what to do about it, I was told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life. 

Now, my dearest, dearest, mon cher, cher monsieur, you have read this; now you know. So, will you please, at once, pack and leave. This is a landlady’s order. I am dismissing a lodger. I am kicking you out. Go! Scram! Departez! I shall be back by dinnertime, if I do eighty both ways and don’t have an accident (but what would it matter?), and I do not wish to find you in the house. Please, please, leave at once, now, do not even read this absurd note to the end. Go. Adieu. 

The situation, chéri, is quite simple. Of course, I know with absolute certainty that I am nothing to you, nothing at all. Oh yes, you enjoy talking to me (and kidding poor me), you have grown fond of our friendly house, of the books I like, of my lovely garden, even of Lo’s noisy ways— but I am nothing to you. Right? Right. Nothing to you whatever. But if, after reading my “confession,” you decided, in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for you to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then you would be a criminal— worse than a kidnaper who rapes a child. You see, chéri. If you decided to stay, if I found you at home (which I know I won’t— and that’s why I am able to go on like this), the fact of your remaining would only mean one thing: that you want me as much as I do you: as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl. 

Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my dearest, since I know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces (illegible) in the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, mon très, très cher, what a world of love I have built up for you during this miraculous June! I know how reserved you are, how “British.” Your old-world reticence, your sense of decorum may be shocked by the boldness of an American girl! You who conceal your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor bruised heart like this. In years gone by, many disappointments came my way. Mr. Haze was a splendid person, a sterling soul, but he happened to be twenty years my senior, and— well, let us not gossip about the past. My dearest, your curiosity must be well satisfied if you have ignored my request and read this letter to the bitter end. Never mind. Destroy it and go. Do not forget to leave the key on the desk in your room. And some scrap of address so that I could refund the twelve dollars I owe you till the end of the month. Good-bye, dear one. Pray for me— if you ever pray.”
— Charlotte Haze, Lolita (Vintage International)
Tagged: Love Letters, Subtle Comedy
“Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (Vintage International)
Tagged: Azure, The Color of Letters, What Color Is Q?, What Color Is K?, Literary Synesthesia
“It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies.”
— Vladimir Nabokov,
Tagged: Butterflies, The Beauty Flies By, Seeing Seeing
“Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary. But Stalin himself hadn’t needed to take so many risks, because terror worked better. Although, to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking— a relative term in any case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist’s money, at worst of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged— the most successful of them had instead followed Stalin’s example. Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andreas (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten. In the Republic, people had been terrified of the state; under the New Regime, what terrified them was the state of nature: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. In both cases, the fear was entirely reasonable; indeed, it was the product of reason. The full name of the Republic’s ideology had been Scientific Socialism, a name pointing backward to la Terreur (the Jacobins, with their marvelously efficient guillotine, may have been executioners, but they fashioned themselves as executors of Enlightenment rationality) and forward to the terrors of technocracy, which sought to liberate humanity from its humanness through the efficiency of markets and the rationality of machines. This was the truly eternal fixture of illegitimate revolution, this impatience with irrationality, this wish to be clean of it once and for all.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: Risk Taking, Seduction of Unreason, Terror, Web Economics
“It was Andreas’s gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular niches in totalitarian regimes. The Stasi was the best friend he’d ever had— until he met the Internet... The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: The Night After The Revolution, Inherent Control
“He indulged it at first, trying to be a good man, trying to live up to an ideal image that he, too, still had of himself, but there was finally no way around it: endless discussion with a humorless twenty-three-year-old bored him. During the day, when they were apart, he kept picturing her solemn gaze, but when he came home he found a person with no resemblance to the object he’d desired.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: This Is Love, Ideals, Fantasy
“Few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then again, he’d experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution— the scientific, for example— was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.”
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel
Tagged: Revolution, Change, Violently Silent
“It's perhaps here that we find the secret of secrecy. A secret is not a matter of knowing and a secret is for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. ”
— Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
Tagged: Secrets, Secret Secrets, The Secret of Secrecy