Divan Quotes & Sayings

A couple strolled by behind my chair. For a moment, they got between us and the closest light, casting Freddie in a patch of shadow. As the light peeled away, so did the facade. A desiccated corpse reclined on the divan, with skin turned blue and chapped by arctic windburn. The corpse grinned at me from a lipless mouth, showing sharp yellowed teeth. Her nose and most of one cheek had rotted away, the ragged wounds black with frostbite, and iron talons three inches long curled around the stem of her martini glass. Then the light flooded back and the moment was gone. Freddie must have caught the look on my face. She smiled and gave me a wink. — Craig Schaefer

The Crone tires quickly and reaches out for the velvet draperies, sits on the divan, breathing heavily. She's too ancient to have a name any longer. When she coughs you can hear the ages rattling inside her shrunken frame. No human names can cling to her any more- they slip from her dusty shriveled flesh like a young girl's whimsies. — Tom Piccirilli

Sitting on the divan, she touched a finger to the bullet wound in his chest. It seemed so small, so incapable of creating the exodus of blood which had drenched his clothes and skin as he lay in the hospital, waiting for her to claim him. Death has been instantaneous, they said, as if there were a relief in that. She did not want death to have been instantaneous; she wanted to have at least held his hand as he lay dying and said goodbye to him in terms other than the, 'Why are you doing again? You'll find nothing. Stay. Oh all right, go,' that had been her farewell to him that morning.

Stay. Stay. Stay. She should have repeated it like a madwoman, banged her head against the wall in a frenzy, hit him and wept. She should have said it just one more time, just a little more forcefully. She should have taken his dear, sweet head in her hands and kissed his eyes and forehead. Stay. — Kamila Shamsie

I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring. — Lauren DeStefano

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage
a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own. — Lauren DeStefano

Impressive, isn't it?" Divan says with pride. "I purchased it from a Brazilian artist, who has apparently made a career working in flesh. He claims his artwork is to protest unwinding, but I ask you, how much of a protest can it be if he uses the unwound for his art? — Neal Shusterman

My mother said, "Arturo, stop that. Your sister's tired."

"Oh Holy Ghost, Oh Holy inflated triple ego, get us out of the depression. Elect Roosevelt. Keep us on the gold standard. Take France off, but for Christ's sake keep us on!"

"Arturo, stop that"

"Oh Jehovah, in your infinite mutability see if you can't scrape up some coin for the Bandini family."

My mother said, "Shame, Arturo. Shame."

I got up on the divan and yelled, "I reject the hypothesis of God! Down with the decadence of a fraudulent Christianity! Religion is the opium of the people! All that we are or ever hope to be we owe to the devil and his bootleg apples!"

My mother came after me with the broom. — John Fante

The use of tobacco is one of the most evident of all the retrograde influences of our time. It invades all classes, destroys social life, and is turning, in the words of Mantegazza, the whole of Europe into a cigar divan. — Charles R. Drysdale

The world was his divan. There was such a freedom in it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

When he bent down and swept her up in his arms and carried her to the divan, she did not protest. She
fumbled with the buttons of his waistcoat, eager to touch his flesh and feel his heart beat against her hand.
He moved over her and looked down at her with eyes dark with passion. "I have missed you," he said.
"God, how I have missed you."
"Show me," she said, and sighed with happiness when he put his hand on her ankle and began to slide it
up her leg. — Julia London

I never said to you: come back.
Each time that you left forever, I lowered my head and looked at your left hand, I looked at the white carpet in front of the divan on which we were sitting, I didn't say the word, there is no circumstance, then I raised my eyes and looked out the window at the world that was moving away with the solemn slow pace of an ocean liner, — Helene Cixous

The boat lurched.He fell against her, and she fell back, onto the divan.
For onwe glorious moment she lay under him, her magnificent bosom crushed against his chest. His heart leapt into a gallop and his privy councilor leapt to attention. He lifted his head and looked down at her. She looked up at him, eyes wide and dark as an evergreen forest. He felt her breath on his skin, and heard it, soft and hurried. Her lips parted. He lowered his head.
She shoved a fist against his chest, and "Get off!" she snapped. "Get off, you great lummox! Someone's coming! — Loretta Chase

Morning sunlight gave everything a golden, beautiful glow. "We were supposed to have time," she whispered, feeling tears start. How often had she imagined a new beginning for her and Papa, for all of them? They would come together after the war, Isabelle and Vianne and Papa, learn to laugh and talk and be a family again. Now it would never happen; she would never get to know her father, never feel the warmth of his hand in hers, never fall asleep on the divan beside him, never be able to say all that needed to be said between them. Those words were lost, turned into ghosts that would drift away, unsaid. They would never be the family maman had promised. — Kristin Hannah

That's it!" "Anton," her mother gasped. "You startled me." "Sorry, my love." Papa patted her hand as she returned to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. "But I've just had the most astounding idea." "What is it?" The question rang simultaneously from both Nicole and her mother. Her papa smiled. A scheming, devilish, piratical smile that one would expect to see right before a blade ran him through. Nicole flopped onto the divan. "Nicki's going to take a little trip to New Orleans." "But why?" Maman asked. "She just got home." Papa rubbed his palms against his thighs in anticipation. "Don't you see? It will solve everything. It will keep Nicki away from Jenkins and secure the future of Renard Shipping at the same time." "How?" Nicole ventured, somehow certain she'd not like the answer. Her papa's grin confirmed it. "By giving me the next best thing to a son." "And that is . . . ?" her mother prompted. "A son-in-law. — Karen Witemeyer

How much longer on the divan? Why does sex have to mean everything? OK, it can mean something, but why everything? Why do thirty years have to go down the toilet because I wanted to touch somebody else? Am I missing something? Is this what it comes down to? Why does the sex have to mean everything? — Zadie Smith

The more one delves into Rumi's life and his mystical poetry it becomes clear that for him, the issue of faith and reason is incomplete unless one includes the central theme of love. — Rumi

I couldn't get to sleep. The book lay nearby. A thin object on the divan. So strange. Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Boiled down to little black marks. Hair, eyes, voices, nails, legs, knocks on doors, walls, blood, beards, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The a's, f's, y's, k's all run. They gather together to create a horse or a hailstorm. They run again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a murder. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping. — Ismail Kadare

Yes, this was his home. Here no harm could come to him. He smiled at the mere idea that any harm could come to him here. He avoided looking at the divan on which he slept. Every human creature needed a home, not a home of the kind understood by crude knock-you-down patriots, not a religion either, a mere insipid foretaste of a heavenly home: no, a real home, in which space, work, friends, recreation, and the scope of a man's ideas came together into an orderly whole, into - so to speak - a personal cosmos. The best definition of a home was a library. — Elias Canetti

Everybody thinks that once you reach the top, you can lie back on a divan with a goddamn mai tai. No. Wrong. Success is not a mountain climb. Success is a treadmill. — Susan Jane Gilman

That demon woman you were lounging with on the divan," said Will. "Would you call her a friend, or more of a business associate?"
Benedict's dark eyes hardened. "Insolent puppy - "
"Oh, I'd say she was a friend," said Tessa. "One doesn't usually let one's business associates lick one's face. Although I could be wrong. What do I know about these things? I'm only a silly woman. — Cassandra Clare

An Israeli who thinks that his government is doing everything right wouldn't join the Divan Orchestra in the first place. — Daniel Barenboim

The spirit is the mirror; the body is the rust.
(Divan-i-Shamsi Tabriz) — Idries Shah

At such times Daddy, Mummy and Margot leave me cold. I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird whose wings have been clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage. "Go outside, laugh, and take a breath of fresh air," a voice cries within me, but I don't even feel a response any more; I go and lie on the divan and sleep, to make the time pass more quickly, and the stillness and terrible fear, because there is no way of killing them. — Anne Frank

I Missed His Book, But I Read His Name"

Though authors are a dreadful clan
To be avoided if you can,
I'd like to meet the Indian,
M. Anantanarayanan.

I picture him as short and tan.
We'd meet, perhaps, in Hindustan.
I'd say, with admirable elan ,
"Ah, Anantanarayanan --

I've heard of you. The Times once ran
A notice on your novel, an
Unusual tale of God and Man."
And Anantanarayanan

Would seat me on a lush divan
And read his name -- that sumptuous span
Of 'a's and 'n's more lovely than
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan" --

Aloud to me all day. I plan
Henceforth to be an ardent fan
of Anantanarayanan --
M. Anantanarayanan. — John Updike

After crossing herself, she lay back on the divan and squirted a cool puddle of hand lotion from the bottle she'd brought from London. Invariably she would apply too much, and her hands would be slick and shiny in the candlelight as she asked for another pair with which to share the excess. — Anthony Marra

He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him. — Alice Munro

Here it seemed some of them slept for there were divan beds covered with blankets only and a large, much undenticulated, comb. — Evelyn Waugh

He lay down upon a sumptuous divan, and proceeded to instruct himself with honest zeal. — Mark Twain

The episode of Banaka pointing to his chest and crying out of existential anguish reminds me of a line from Goethe's West-East Divan: "Is one man alive when others are alive?" Deep within Goethe's query lies the secret of the writer's creed. By writing books, the individual becomes a universe (we speak of the universe of Balzac, the universe of Chekhov, the universe of Kafka, do we not?). And since the principal quality of a universe is its uniqueness, the existence of another universe constitutes a threat to its very essence. — Milan Kundera

If she ever got fat, she thought, or if she ever said anything fat, she would lock herself in a bathroom and stay there until she died," thinks the young protagonist Molly Fawcett. "Often she thought how comfortably you could live in a bathroom. You could put a piece of beaver board on top of the tub and use it as a bed. In the daytime, you could have a cretonne spread on it so that it would look like a divan. You could use the you-know-what as a chair and the lavatory as a table. You wouldn't have to have anything else but some canned corn and marshmallows ... — Jean Stafford

The man behind the divan stood up, the machine pistol quivering in his grasp. There was a flash, Abigail thinking he'd pulled the trigger, the walls of the sitting area lighting up, the snow glinting. It went dark again. Muffled thunder rolled through the basin, shook the chandelier, the weakened floor trembling beneath her feet. — Blake Crouch

Your soul is so close to mine
That what you dream, I know. ...
I know everything you think of: your heart is so close to mine! — Rumi

You see, Risa, survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences. When the need is great enough, and the music loud enough, we can stomp conscience into the ground.'
Risa closes her eyes. She knows the dance ...
'It's the way of the world,' Divan continues. 'Look at unwinding, society's grand gavotte of denial. There will, no doubt, come a time when people look to one another and say, 'My God, what have we done?' But I don't believe it will happen any time soon. Until then, the dance must have music; the chorus must have its voice. Give it that voice, Risa. Play for me.'
But Risa's fingers offer him nothing, and the Orgao Organico holds the obdurate, unyielding silence of the grave. — Neal Shusterman