Quotes from book

The Goldfinch

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”

“Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.”

“Who was it that said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?”

“Over 2,000 reptiles await you.”

“Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?”

“We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.”

“… my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.”

“Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”

“… as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.”

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life”

“Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”

“The sky was a rich, mindless, never-ending blue, like a promise of some ridiculous glory that wasn’t really there.”

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;”

“When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.”

“He was a planet without an atmosphere.”

“We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”

“Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.”

“As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.”