Showing posts with label PenguinRandomHouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PenguinRandomHouse. Show all posts

 

"She said that there was some relief at surviving what you might have thought was not survivable. 'No one would ever choose to have cancer or to be raped,' she wrote. 'But you don't get to choose, and it is possible at least to understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like 'To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,' or to begin to understand the line in 'King Lear'--'Ripeness is all.'"

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About Alice by Calvin Trillin

 


"In the metropolis that is Toronto, you need to be upper middle class just to be lower middle class and if you're worse off than that, well, there's Scarborough or Hamilton."

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The Candidate by Noah Richler

"In the morning, Barry was happy to get back on the bus, but he was frightened, too. He was bringing someone to Layla, but who was that someone? A failed businessman? A man who couldn't close the deal with Jeff Park? A cheating husband? An unconvincing lover? There was a young trans woman in front of him who couldn't afford the fare to San Francisco. She was eating an ice cream and crying. But even in her tears she knew who she was."
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Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

"Scranton writes, 'We are not free to choose how we live any more than we are free to break the laws of physics. We choose from possible options, not ex nihilo.'"
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We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer

"People die all the time, and in droves at that. This afternoon's bombing in Aleppo didn't seem to have quite the same effect on Australians, who, at that very moment, were meeting up for dinner in Sydney. And in Toronto, Canadians rushing to work won't even know about it yet. They'll learn about it soon enough, but most won't bother to read beyond the headline; it's just another ordinary explosion, after all."
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Dawn by Selahattin Demirtas

"Suppose you are deciding whether or not to go on a date with someone you met on Tinder. Based on your extensive dating experience, you figure there's a 5% chance the date will be a total bust...There is a 60% chance your date will be perfectly nice, but there will be no chemistry and awkward, strained conversation. There is a 30% chance you'll like each other enough to date for three months and then break up and feel indifferent about it. And there's a 5% chance the date will be amazing and you'll walk away thinking you met the love of your life. Deciding whether or not to go on the date isn't just a matter of 35% good versus 65% bad. If you look at it that way, you'll never leave home."
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An Economist Walks into a Brothel by Allison Schrager

Three Laws of Psychopharmacology
The very definition of an addictive drug is one that stimulates the mesolimbic pathway, but there are three general axioms in psychopharmacology that also apply to all drugs:
1. All drugs act by changing the rate of what is already going on.
2. All drugs have side effects.
3. The brain adapts to all drugs that affect it by counteracting the drug's effects.

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Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel


"All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth."
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Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood

"They went down the stairs. It was still quite early, a few minutes after eight. They walked to the bus stop on Westbourne Grove. Clouds moved in the sky, the sun came and went, and as they reached the corner the wind dislodged blossoms from all the trees in the street."
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Turbulence by David Szalay


"Deprivation is a portal into more life. Not only can you tolerate it, it's the pathway to living more fully than you ever thought possible. Once you live through it, deprivation frees you from being enslaved to your impulses."
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Coming Alive by Barry Michels & Phil Stutz


"Soyeon's mother knew from soap operas that happiness often comes at a price; that once lives are tangled up, they can never be untangled. Pain is proof of something worthwhile."
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The Sadness of Beautiful Things by Simon Van Booy

"When Esperanza was born, a pair of serpents lived inside my head. Their job was to warn me of the dangers of motherhood, which boiled down to this: If you touch your baby, she will die. My body, commandeered, a vessel of evil, was leaking evil into my child. The serpents spoke in opposite voices. If one was soft, the other was loud...they scrutinized my every move."
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Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee

"This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life -- the distance I've traveled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms -- that I almost crashed the car."
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The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson

"'I don't like men who leave behind them a trail of weeping women,' said W.H. Auden. Who would have hated you."
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The Friend by Sigrid Nunez



"'It's not over. You'll see. Winter comes, you get sentimental...A few words are all you need to start again. Who will pull the other one in after a period of silence, who will draw the other one out. Who cracks first and begs for attention, who shows the greater disregard for their sanity. You have that to look forward to.'"
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Who is Rich? by Matthew Klam

"For example: 'I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain.' Why would a desert miss the rain? Why wasn't it okay for a desert to be a desert, why couldn't anything just be the way it was, why did it always have to be missing something?"

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The Idiot by Elif Bautman

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