Lara > Lara's Quotes

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“for when i look at you, even a moment, no
speaking is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be. But for now, we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We can endure all kinds of pain. It’s shame that eats men whole.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“This is how I lived back then– through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“I had always liked the act of leaving, the expanse between departure and arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined by another kind of time.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it. Little sparks cause fires, too.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“what is the difference between
poetry and prose you know the old analogies prose
is a house poetry a man in flames running
quite fast through it”
― Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.”
― Joan Didion