Elvera V > Elvera's Quotes

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can't bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art

Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art

Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca.

I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”
― Jean Cocteau

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”
― Jean Cocteau

“If you can't convince them, confuse them.”
― Harry S. Truman

“Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous.”
― Albert Einstein

“If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Temple

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
― Woodrow Wilson, New Freedom

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.”
― Edvard Munch

“Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
and what you want to happen
in time, sacrificed.”
― Jalaluddin Rumi

“I will fear no man that bleeds the same blood as I
who carries the same scars, fresh wounds, or healed over marks.
Cause despite being through the pain
I'm alive, I'm present and nothing they do can hurt me more than I can myself.”
― adya agni

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”
― Franz Kafka

“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“I am going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life.”
― Elsie de Wolfe

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.”
― Joseph Campbell

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“And then, one fairy night, May became June.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth

“There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
― Marilyn Monroe