Renata > Renata's Quotes

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”
― Kait Rokowski

“I once read in my physics book that the universe begs to be observed, that energy travels and transfers when people pay attention. Maybe that's what love really boils down to--having someone who cares enough to pay attention so that you're encouraged to travel and transfer, to make your potential energy spark into kinetic energy.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it. As people get older, they finally give jealousy up, or at least they put it off for as long as possible until there’s such incontrovertible evidence”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans: Stories

“I wonder if I'll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I’m always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there’s some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky.”
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans

“I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole. I could wait for you in the dark. I could howl against your hair.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams

“Listen, everything is possible in here. You can burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom. You can cut your hair before he ever gets the chance to climb up. It is possible to decline the beanstalk. You can let the old witch dance at your wedding, hand out the kind of forgiveness that would wake the dead and sleeping. You can just walk away, get on a horse, and go wake some other maiden from her narrative coffin, if you’re brave, if you’re strong. What do you want? Do you want to escape? Or were you looking for that candy house?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams

“I tell them: don’t depend on a woodsman in the third act. I tell them: look for sets of three, or seven. I tell them: there’s always a way to survive. I tell them: you can’t force fidelity. I tell them: don’t make bargains that involve major surgery. I tell them: you don’t have to lie still and wait for someone to tell you how to live. I tell them: it’s all right to push her into the oven. She was going to hurt you. I tell them: she couldn’t help it. She just loved her own children more. I tell them: everyone starts out young and brave. It’s what you do with it that matters. I tell them: you can share that bear with your sister. I tell them: no-one can stay silent forever. I tell them: it’s not your fault. I tell them: mirrors lie. I tell them: you can wear those boots, if you want them. You can lift that sword. It was always your sword. I tell them: the apple has two sides. I tell them: just because he woke you up doesn’t mean you owe him anything. I tell them: his name is Rumplestiltskin.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams

“Não me cantem canções da luz do dia / Pois o sol é o inimigo dos amantes / Cantem das sombras e da escuridão / E das lembranças da meia-noite.”
― Sidney Sheldon, Memories of Midnight

“Ser mulher, explicavam, era como ter o trabalho todo do que respeita à humanidade. Que os homens era para tarefas avulsas, umas participações quase nenhumas. Serviam para quase nada. Como se fossem traves de madeira que se usavam momentaneamente para segurar um teto que ameaçasse cair. Se não valessem pela força, nunca valeriam por motivo algum, porque de coração estavam sempre mal feitos. Eram gulosos, pouco definidos, mudavam com facilidade os desejos, não conheciam a lealdade passional, concebiam apenas engenharias e mediam até os amores pelo lado prático da beleza, gostavam sempre de quem lhes parecesse dar mais jeito, como se procurassem empregadas ao invés de esposas, como se precisassem de precaver os seus próprios defeitos mais do que as virtudes livres das mulheres.”
― valter hugo mãe, A Desumanização

“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Mas não quero resposta, quero ficar só. Gosto muito das pessoas mas essa necessidade voraz que às vezes me vem de me libertar de todos. Enriqueço na solidão: fico inteligente, graciosa e não esta feia ressentida que me olha do fundo do espelho. Ouço duzentas e noventa e nove vezes o mesmo disco, lembro poesias, dou piruetas, sonho, invento, abro todos os portões e quando vejo a alegria está instalada em mim.”
― Lygia Fagundes Telles, As Meninas

“Ouça, Virgínia, é preciso amar o inútil. Criar pombos sem pensar em comê-los, plantar roseiras sem pensar em colher as rosas, escrever sem pensar em publicar, fazer coisas assim, sem esperar nada em troca. A distância mais curta entre dois pontos pode ser a linha reta, mas é nos caminhos curvos que se encontram as melhores coisas.”
― Lygia Fagundes Telles, Ciranda de Pedra

“— Assim é melhor. Então você ainda gosta dele? Terá que esquecer, Virgínia. Amar a pessoa errada não é das melhores coisas que nos podem acontecer e acontece com tanta frequência. Dante se esqueceu desse círculo no seu inferno, o dos rejeitados.”
― Lygia Fagundes Telles, Ciranda de Pedra

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The Moon"

There is such loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
Who the first Adam saw. The long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her
With ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“This is the underside of my world.

Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want to ensure the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come to for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job, and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be so wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.

As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“Alas, it was never meant for us to hear. It was never meant for us to know. We ought never be taught to read. We fight through the constant male refractoriness of our surroundings; our souls are torn out of us with such shock that there isn't even any blood. Remember: I didn't and don't want to be a 'feminine' version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“Then he said, leaning forward: ‘You’re strange animals, you women intellectuals. Tell me: what’s it like to be a woman?’ I took my rifle from behind my chair and shot him dead. ‘It’s like that,’ I said.”
― Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God

“There is this business of the narcissism of love, the fourth-dimensional curve that takes you out into the other who is the whole world, which is really a twist back into yourself, only a different self.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“The idea that any art is achieved 'intuitively' is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artist as subhuman. It is those supposed incapable of intelligence, training, or connection with a tradition who are described as working by instinct or intuition.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

“How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition?”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing