26 Quotes by Reif Larsen

This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.

A text is evolutionary by its very nature.

I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist and I'm influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded vision trying to realize our perfection," he says. At critical moments in the book, T.S. registers his inkling of this realization. When he makes his maps, it feels like taking down dictation from the universe.

I suddenly had an idea of how adults can hold on to a feeling for very long periods of time, long after the event is finished, long after cards have been sent and apologies made and everyone else had moved on. Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions

Were I to spend my life commenting on the world that I see, I would never see the world.

Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside of your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?

I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long.

I had trouble listening to adults who didn’t really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.

One cannot spend one’s entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!