Eloise > Eloise's Quotes

“I don't understand my feelings. I really don't. I don't understand how I could hate you so much after so much time. How, no matter how much I'd like to not hate you, I hate you even more. It grows.”
― Sam Shepard, Fool for Love

“Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

“He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

“I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.”
― Arthur Miller

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You can quicker get back a million dollars that was stolen than a word that you gave away.”
― Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge: A Play in Two Acts

“You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”
― Arthur Miller

“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“If you believe that life is worth living then your belief will create the fact.”
― Arthur Miller

“Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.”
― Sydney Smith

“It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence. ”
― Sydney Smith

“But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. ”
― Dave Eggers

“People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination”
― Sydney Smith

“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.”
― Don DeLillio, Underworld

“You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

“There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“But you see, the measure of hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.”
― Ayn Rand

“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

“Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”
― Ayn Rand

“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
― Ansel Adams

“If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.”
― Ayn Rand

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged