Colin > Colin's Quotes

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you”
― Vincent O'Sullivan, The next room

“People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.”
― Bill Watterson

“Dudes," He said, "Do not follow other dudes to the bathroom."

Isabelle sighed. "Latent homosexual panic will do you in every time”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels

“Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.”
― Norah Vincent

“You become a man not when you reach a certain age, but when you reach a certain state of mind.”
― Habeeb Akande

“For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn't decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.”
― Rumi, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“...gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself...what they imitate is a phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity...gay identities work neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it, that it 'knows' it's own possibility of becoming undone”
― Judith Butler

“Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.”
― william s. burroughs

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible”
― William S. Burroughs

“Open your mind and let the pictures out”
― William S. Burroughs

“Visibility is a trap.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”
― John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity

“One should use common words to say uncommon things”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line...”
― Yukio Mishima

“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you’re a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn’t belong here. So I’m going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can’t do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because if you ever want to have girl parts, they need that to make them.' I pulled that one right out of my ass. He handed me the scissors and said, 'Okay.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.”
― Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

“What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir