Lili > Lili's Quotes

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
― Maya Angelou

“But I miss you to the point of anguish.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre

“In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”
― Jenny Holzer

“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.”
― Marcel Proust

“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
― Edith Wharton, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

“We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
― anaïs nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”
― Roland Barthes

“I decided to stay in bed until noon. Maybe by then half the world would be dead and it would only be half as hard to take.”
― Charles Bukowski, Pulp: Charles Bukowski's Final Hardboiled Noir Comedy – Lady Death, Aliens, and the Absurd

“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not 'here, here, here'; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoke to, some women in the street, some man behind a counter - even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps - perhaps.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Languages are not strangers to on another.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.”
― Audre Lorde

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing.”
― Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
― Bell Hooks

“My friend...care for your psyche...know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves" -Socrates”
― Socrates

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”
― Charles Bukowski

“...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.”
― Anton Chekhov

“But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”
― Raymond Williams