Julia > Julia's Quotes

“You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories

“Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man.

They don't make memories like that anymore”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.
A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“Why so many of us knocked us major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were tring to give evolution a shove in the right direction - in the direction of smaller brains.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“Just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilogrammes! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute.
So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogramme brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.

Quoth Mandarax:

Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!

- GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It's funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we're at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Most people go through their whole lives, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.”
― Sally Rooney , Normal People

“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he used as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“People are a lot more knowable than they think they are.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured, It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People