Zoë Heller Quotes
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...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends , there's nothing left.
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For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.
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It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it.
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There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.
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It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.
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I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.
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When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.
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It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.
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I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
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Somewhere between sanity and madness lays a fine line, for some it is a tightrope walked daily, a fight for balance to be won or lost. That fight is lost one of two ways. Some simply lose their balance and fall, others are pushed.
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Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.
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When I tried to do something else, everyone behaved as if I was Gypsy Rose Lee trying to paint a Matisse.
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If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed?
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It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.