Quotes by Writers - Page 49

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.
Fernando Pessoa
Just because a marriage ended didn't mean that it hadn't been happy at times.
Liane Moriarty
She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.
A.S. Byatt
There was something pathetic about the rejected wife bravely pulling herself together, joining a tennis club, doing a photography course, cutting her hair, venturing timidly back out onto the single scene.
Liane Moriarty
When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family, Madeline had told her once.
Liane Moriarty
I don't believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
The structure of straight coupledom still represents an appropriation of the physical and psychic energy of women to benefit men. And insofar as gay people re-create the straight couple, this structure of violence, domination, and emotional paucity is what they are re-creating. Whatever Beyoncé says about not making a big deal out of the little things, marriage is no more the logical full extension of sexual desire than prison is the utmost expression of sheltering from a rainstorm
Hannah Black
It is exhausting living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.
David Wojnarowicz
Dan: 'Ah, well, I hope this didn't have anything to do with me.'Ellen: 'No, not unless you played Cat Woman in Batman.
Ellen DeGeneres
Author? Author? Did you write these legs?''Yes."'Well, I don't like dem. I don't like 'em at all at all. I could ha' writted better legs meself.
Spike Milligan
An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)
H.G.Wells
Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.
Hilary Mantel
It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
Samuel Johnson
I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.
Libba Bray
No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made.
George Sand
Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully,"that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
...those who deny or oppose these so pleasant delights (of virtue), do so only from jealousy, you may be sure, from the barbarous pleasure of making others as guilty and unhappy as they are. They are blind and would like everyone to be the same, they are mistaken, and would like everyone else to be mistaken; but if you could see into the depths of their hearts you would find only sorrow and repentance; all these apostles of crime are only evil and desperate people; you would not find a sincere person among them who would not admit, if he were truthful, that their poisonous words or dangerous writings had not been guided only by their passions. And what man in fact can say in cold blood that the bases of morality can be shaken without risk? What being would dare maintain that doing good and desiring good are not essentially the aim of mankind? And how can a man who will do only evil expect to be happy in a society whose strongest concern is the perpetual increase of good? But will not this apologist of crime not shudder himself when he had uprooted from all hearts the only thing which could lead to his conversion? What will stop his servants ruining him, if they have ceased to be virtuous?
Marquis de Sade
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
Herman Melville
Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I'm self-taught. I didn't just become a man, it was a decision.
Aiden Shaw
As she began to speak she stood and started to wrap herself, expertly, creating a binding in minutes that held without a wrinkle until the show ended. Peggy made a connection between binding her breasts and wrapping her hands in boxing wraps; this was what one did before battle, to protect one's self (and it is the Self, absolutely, that binding protects for many butches).
S. Bear Bergman
You do not see deviantly gendered people walking around with Nalgene bottles, getting our sixty-four recommended ounces as we go through our days. I am sure that somewhere there is an argument to be made that the trans community as a whole is a little cranky because we could all use a nice big glass of water.
S. Bear Bergman
There are more locations than girl and boy, man and woman. Decamping from one does not have to mean climbing into another. There’s plenty of space in between, or beyond the bounds, or all along and across the plane or sphere or whatever of gender, and it is entirely okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shall be a boy.” But it must also be okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, so I shall set about changing what it means to be a girl,” and, yes, okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shan’t.
S. Bear Bergman
My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.
S. Bear Bergman
If a woman tells a man the god favor him, everybody says she's far-minded.' The broom halted mid-sweep and the slave turned to Hild. 'But let a woman do what the gods tell her, without asking a man's permission first? Then she's possessed.' Unwen punctuated her words with her broom, jabbing it into the corner.
Rebecca Barnhouse
So please, for the love of gender- go bloom. Or water someone else while they do.
S. Bear Bergman
shall we dance into the perpetual torture of our union once more?
A.P. Sweet
The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle- making inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen.
o.henry
To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking
Agnes De Mille
Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on.
A.S. Byatt
Wyatt avoided the petty gunfights and headed to a saloon and rigged up a bunch of Molotov cocktails. Her firebombs against members of Tom and Vik's posse had destroyed the scenario's promise of so many wonderful gun duels. She'd killed most of their group, too, and shown everyone that she wasn't getting promoted only because of her programming skills. Her dislike of fighting had paradoxically turned her into a lethal killing machine.
S.J. Kincaid
Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.
Otto Weininger
Most geniuses are geniuses because of the way they manage their natural talents. He was one because of the way he took advantage of the world's defects.-pg 129
Albert Sánchez Piñol
Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.
Denis Diderot
Genius is full of trash.
Herman Melville
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
Orson Welles
The necessity of political struggle especially means confronting and contradicting those on the left who say that resistance is futile. Such people have no place in a movement for justice. For actionists who choose to work aboveground, this confrontation with detractors - and some of these detractors reject the idea of resistance of any kind - is one of the small, constant actions you can take. Defend the possibility of resistance, insist on a moral imperative of fighting for this planet, and argue for direct action against perpetrators. Despite what much of the left has now embraced, we are not all equally responsible. There are a few corporations that have turned the planet into a dead commodity for their private wealth, destroying human cultures along with it.
Lierre Keith
What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.
Lierre Keith
Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.
Lierre Keith
how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.
Herman Melville
Preparing to go to school was like getting ready for extended deep sea diving.
Jean Shepherd
I go back to Oberlin in the dead of winter to give a "convocation speech" in Finney Chapel, the largest and most historic of campus structures. In a subconscious nod to my college experience I forget to pack both tights and underwear and have to spend the weekend going commando in a wool skirt and knee socks. I am toured around the school like a stranger by a girl who didn't even go here. We stop at a glossy new cafe for tea and scones. She asks if I want a tour of the dormitories- no, I just want to wander around alone and maybe cry.
Lena Dunham
I've always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me "You're still awake! Hiiii." And I'd think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that.
Lena Dunham
Wendy’s house, unlike many in Cape Breton, had three floors, along with a basement and attic. Aside from Wendy’s bedroom, there was a laundry room. The dirty water in the sink would rush from the washer hose, bubbling up, threatening to overflow, but it never did. Next-door was a motel with a neon sign that read in turquoise and pink, “We have the best rates in town!”, but the ‘E’ in ‘rates’ kept flickering on and off day and night so that every few seconds it would switch to, “We have the best rats in town!
Rebecca McNutt
I have a habit of being an archaeologist of my own past, a sentimental collector of personal artefacts which may at first glance appear random, but each of which holds a unique significance. As the years pass me by, I find that the number of objects within my possession begins to accumulate. A torn map. A sealed letter. A boat full of paper animals. Each item encapsulates within itself a story, akin to an outward manifestation of my inner journey.
Agnes Chew
And the further they go, the more they'll remember, they can take it from me.
Rohinton Mistry
I think it's my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.
Frankie Boyle
I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.
Banana Yoshimoto
…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.
Enrique de Hériz
As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life. pg.404
Hilary Mantel
Beliefs converge and become something new all the time.
Libba Bray
We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavour to efface them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It's one of the great temptations, you see--wanting to prove the strength of your own faith by making others believe what you believe. It shows you're right. But it doesn't prove anything of the sort. All it proves is that you're condescending and arrogant and good at doing what half-decent actors can do, or advertising agents, or pop stars, or politicians, or con men, or any of the professional persuaders. They sell illusions. And that's all they do. And they feel good when they succeed. That's what their lives depend on. Which isn't true about religion. Or shouldn't be. Your belief shouldn't depend on what other people think about it. And it certainly should not depend on whether other people believe the same as you.
Aidan Chambers
You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you. (As Silent Bob)
Kevin Smith
I, who was empty… I made myself believe that I could only fill it.. by falling in love… at that time to me.. in this world around you, Nana... Everything was so shiny that I was blinded. That doesn’t mean that anyone would suit me… I just wanted to be in the same light as you.
Ai Yazawa
He pressed against Master's greatcoat and rubbed him with his shoulder, which meant that he understood everything and was ready for anything, even to die if need be. Ruslan had not yet had to face death himself, but he had seen men and dogs die. There was nothing more terrible, but if he was with Master, it was another matter: that he could stand.
Georgi Vladimov
He crept up, and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I— a dog?" said that mute caress.
Ouida
If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleve
Elbert Hubbard