Sara Collins > Quotes

“A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“She had the knowledge from her mother, old knowledge. So long as you carried it in your head they couldn't take it away, she used to say. Not like weapons, or food, or clothes.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“Only two types of white people in this world, chile, the ones doing shit to you and the ones wanting you to tell them ’bout the shit them other ones did.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“I think the point of reading is not to feel more a part of this world, but less. To take oneself out of it. On paper, everything can be hammered into shape, though the world is shapeless. The trouble with writers is they spend their lives trying to lie to themselves.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“English rain weighs nothing. It’s the air that’s heavy, and always has the seep of water in it.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“But the mind is its own place, as Milton said, it can make a Hell of Heaven and a Heaven of Hell. How does it do that? By remembering, or forgetting. The only tricks a mind can play.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“So. There are some things that cannot be brought into the light, Frances.’ ‘Then let it be done in the dark!’ I cried. ‘Only let it be done.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“Oh, they're fond of telling you things you already know. I swear they'd fish a man out of an ocean just so as they could shout at him, 'Why sir, I do believe that you have been drowning!' It's nonsense, but they think it's true because they believe it.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“What did Shakespeare know? Love must alter, or it can't survive.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“But the first thing to know about whoring is that it’s work. You do it same way you’d empty a chamber pot, head down, nose pinched. Many an English wife must get herself through the same activity in the same fashion.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“How true it is that ugly people have hope while pretty people have expectation”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“You can find ways to shut things out after they've happened, but not when you're worrying about whether they will.”
― Sara Collins

“A novel is like a long, warm drink but a poem is a spike through the head.”
― Sara Collins

“No man can be as clever as the world thinks he is,’ I said,”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“...with all that talk of science, last night, I cannot think of anything worse than spending all that time trying to understand the mechanics of life but not the beauty of it.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“I tried begging. I tried standing up to do it, at first, but soon learned it worked better the dirtier you looked, the lower you crouched, and the further you stretched out your hand. The coves weren't giving, you see, they were buying. What they paid for was humiliation. Yours, an indemnity against theirs.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton