Heather Jones > Heather's Quotes

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”
― Jim Morrison

“The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces.

There is no special trick about writing or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it....

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.

The point of being an artist is that you may live....

You won't arrive. It is an endless search.”
― Sherwood Anderson

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”
― Edna O'Brien, A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories

“We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

“I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty...But I am too busy thinking about myself.”
― Edith Sitwell

“Anger is a brief madness.”
― Horace

“I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“And watch two men washing clothes,
one makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. they seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony.

Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice, but there's really only one work.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

“All knowledge is worth having.”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”
― Simone Weil