ERIN > ERIN's Quotes

“I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
― Herbert Bayard Swope

“I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”
― Andy Warhol

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
― Joe Klaas, The Twelve Steps to Happiness: A Practical Handbook for Understanding and Working the Twelve Step Programs for Alcoholism, Codependency, Eating Disorders, and Other Addictions

“If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women

“Feminism is hated because women are hated. Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of woman hating.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.”
― Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories

“Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.”
― Octavia Butler

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“I always notice flowers.”
― Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol's Party Book

“It is foolish to conjure up woe where none exists.”
― Christopher Paolini

“I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life

“The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.”
― Christopher Paolini, Eldest

“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I am not your justification for existence.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.”
― Albert Dietrich, Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth.”
― Albert Camus

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play