It was an uncertain spring.
— Virginia Woolf, “The Years”
Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days.
— Joshua Ferris, “Then We Came to the End”
Lord! How sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people.
— Samuel Pepys, diary
I have let myself go and am less strict with myself.
— Leo Tolstoy, diary
The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.
— Barbara Pym, “Excellent Women”
A friend of mine says this is the beginning of the end of the global order.
— Rachel Cusk, “Coventry”
One day someone will use the last surviving Latin word in English to say something like, This sucks.
— Michael Hofmann, interview in The Paris Review
I’ve heard the saying “That sucks” for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.
— Stephen King, “The Stand”
Nuts to the educational value of suffering.
— Robert Christgau, “Going Into the City”
The premonition of apocalypse springs eternal in the human breast.
— Irving Kristol, “On the Democratic Idea in America”
Who opens the morning paper without the wild hope of huge headlines announcing some great disaster? Provided of course that it affects other people and not oneself.
— Iris Murdoch, “A Fairly Honourable Defeat”
One reason cats are happier than people
is that they have no newspapers.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, “In the Mecca”
Show me a plague, and I’ll show you the world!
— Larry Kramer, “The American People, Volume One”
Nothing ill come near thee!
— William Shakespeare, “Cymbeline”
May I kiss the hand that wrote “Ulysses”?
No, it did lots of other things, too.
— James Joyce, in conversation with a fan
That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious diseases.
— Don DeLillo, “The Angel Esmeralda”
All is infection, mother …
We shall sit quietly in this room,
and I think we’ll be spared.
— Rita Dove, “Fiammetta Breaks Her Peace”
It glistened in a billion pairs of eyes.
— Robert Stone, “A Flag for Sunrise”
Under what circumstances can you imagine sleeping with me? Global apocalypse? National pandemic?
— Karen Russell, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.
— Cormac McCarthy, “The Road”
Maybe beauty is medicine quivering on the spoon.
— Lucia Perillo, “Fubar”
Do you periodically walk around and check to see that “the area is secure”?
— Padgett Powell, “The Interrogative Mood”
Do your friends shun you? Do people cross the street when they see you approaching?
— Flann O’Brien, “The Best of Myles”
I’ve always thought of the whole of life as a kind of disaster area.
— J.G. Ballard, “The Drought”
I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
— Mary Karr, “Lit”
Even a king will find himself alone.
— Philip Larkin, “End”
If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.
— Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre
How we survived: we locked the doors
and let nobody in.
— Ellen Bryan Voigt, “Kyrie”
If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.
— Clive James, “Latest Readings”
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
— Iris Murdoch, “The Sea, the Sea”
No restaurants? The means of consoling oneself: reading cookbooks.
— Attributed to Charles Baudelaire
Make up your mind to drink wine in quantity.
— Kingsley Amis, “On Drink”
There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.
— Bret Easton Ellis, “American Psycho”
Smokeless and breadless, we face a bad weekend.
— Dylan Thomas, “Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas”
When he is sick, every man wants his mother.
— Philip Roth, “The Anatomy Lesson”
You’re marvelous to me when I’m ill. It’s when I’m well that you’re no use.
— Howard Jacobson, “The Finkler Question”
If you are solitary be not idle.
— Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson”
My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.
— Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.
— Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor”
Hope is a kind of rigor. Despair is sugar.
— Aravind Adiga, “Amnesty”
Life’s tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars’ worth of euphoria go the distance.
— Stanley Elkin, “Pieces of Soap”
Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for.
— Joseph O’Neill, “Netherland”
The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
— Attributed to Charles Lamb
Dwight Garner, a book critic for The Times, is the author of the forthcoming “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany,” from which these quotations are drawn.
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