“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer, book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Jonathan Safran Foer262

Novelist 1977

LaVyrle Spencer (1943) American writer

Source: Hummingbird

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”

Charles Frazier book Cold Mountain

Source: Cold Mountain

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Wild Geese

“No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

“If there was anything her short life had taught her, it was that a person must be tough. Otherwise, you were had.”

Katherine Paterson book The Great Gilly Hopkins

Gilly Hopkins
The Great Gilly Hopkins (1978)

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 15 (p. 140)

“But it is woven into her nature - to laud to the skies the person she admires. But apart from these defects, where would you find a woman like her who has given up her life and soul for India?”

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) Indian politician, governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh from 1947 to 1949

Mahatma Gandhi, "Sarojini the Singer", 1 December 2013, MK Gandhi Organization http://www.mkgandhi.org/Selected%20Letters/Sarojini/singer.htm,

“You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

“She was not a person who would allow the system to dictate her life.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990), p. 18

“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”

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Jonathan Safran Foer262

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