kimi > kimi's Quotes

“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“If you knew the old me, maybe you could forgive the current me.”
― Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City

“I did not understand you. I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice. This is a recollection which ought to make me forgive every one sooner than myself.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“If we meet each other in hell, it's not hell.”
― Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012

“There’s a Haitian saying, “Pitit moun se lave yon bò, kite yon bò.” When you bathe other people’s children, it says, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty. I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people’s children not to give over their whole hearts, because they will never get a whole heart back.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don't think it's a privilege or an indulgence, it's not even a quest. I think it's almost like knowledge, which is to say, it's what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling us what it is, I think it would exist in any case.

The startle and the wonder of being in this place. This overwhelming beauty—some of it is natural, some of it is man-made, some of it is casual, some of it is a mere glance—is an absolute necessity. I don't think we can do without it any more than we can do without dreams or oxygen.”
― Toni Morrison

“Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people. This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos.”
― James Baldwin

“My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.”
― mary shelley

“Gone, never to return, but the memory hangs on for all of eternity.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.


Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed and mariage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we are met,
And cloisterd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.


Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.”
― John Donne

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What might have faded away naturally over time became etched in stone.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ‘can’t swallow.’ That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend’s flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence.
The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption.

At the same time real love is a don’t-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching.

Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up.

Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won’t eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me.

Sign my death with your teeth”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“I’ve hoarded

your name in my mouth for months. My throat

is a beehive pitched in the river. Look!
Look how long this love can hold its breath.”
― Sierra DeMulder, Today Means Amen

“Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”
― John Donne

“Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

“Most Like an Arch This Marriage

Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what’s strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.”
― John Ciardi, The Collected Poems

“Each was acting out of self-interest—but a heart driven by self-interest is still a heart and, having a heart, one must feel the joys and sorrows of life.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“But do not look down on even the most minute of things; for with the coming of daybreak, even the tiniest particles of dust in this world sing and dance in the sunlight.”
― Anyi Wang, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“She had naturally high aspirations, but having come to terms with the limitations imposed by her environment, she developed a habit of splashing cold water on her hopes.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“Only after shifting her gaze to the woman under the lamplight did she suddenly realize that the actress was pretending to be dead—but she could not tell if the woman was meant to have been murdered or to have committed suicide. The strange thing was that this scene did not terrifying or foreboding, only annoyingly familiar.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“Here was the apparition he had been yearning for day and night, the dream he had hoped would never end.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“A twenty-six-year-old heart has already begun to grow a shell; the shell may have some cracks and fissures, but by the age of thirty-six any remaining fissures would have been sealed.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“After all, life flows like water through one’s fingers, and eternity is but an illusion. Once we have come to terms with that, nothing else really matters.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“What moves you about the longtang of Shanghai stems from the most mundane scenes: not the surging rush of clouds and rain, but something steadily accumulated over time. It is the excitement of cooking smoke and human vitality. Something is flowing through the longtang that is unpredictable yet entirely rational, small, not large, and trivial—but then even a castle can be made out of sand. It has nothing to do with things like “history,” not even “unofficial history”: we can only call it gossip.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai