V Robinson > V's Quotes

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#1

“Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health.
However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?"
Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.”
― Salvador Dalí, Dalí's Mustache

tags: crazy, dalí, humor, mustache

330 likes

#2

“Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him. It is well known that women can deal with this sort of thing better than men can. Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic. Men, for some mysterious reason, find life more difficult than women do. (My mother believes this, despite the female bodies, trapped, diseased, disappearing, or abandoned, that litter her stories.) Men must be allowed to play in the sandbox of their choice, as happily as they can, without disturbance; otherwise they get cranky and won't eat their dinners. There are all kinds of things that men are simply not equipped to understand, so why expect it of them? Not everyone shares this believe about men; neverthetheless, it has its uses.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

tags: belief, capabilities, female-body, gender, men, misandry, sandboxes, useful-belief, women

10 likes

#3

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

tags: definition-untranslatable-words

1547 likes

#4

“Sometimes i think if nobody spoke to me, i'd never speak again.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

tags: isolation

262 likes

#5

“You spoke carefully, as if the story was a flame in your hands in the wind.

...I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.

That was the day I learned how dangerous a colour can be.

...Even if colour is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

tags: childhood, homophobia, identity, masculinity, memoir

3 likes

#6

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
― Richard Siken

tags: crying, love, regret

2151 likes

#7

“But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?”
― Mark Twain

352 likes

#8

“They misunderestimated me.”
― George W. Bush

tags: dumb, gibberish

199 likes

#9

“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
― George W. Bush

476 likes

#10

“Thank you, your Holiness. Awesome speech.”
― George W. Bush

50 likes

#11

“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.”
― Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

79 likes

#12

“I've been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn't listen. Every time you said 'Farm Boy do this' you thought I was answering 'As you wish' but that's only because you were hearing wrong. 'I love you' was what it was, but you never heard.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

tags: codes, devotion, ignorance, love

699 likes

#13

“I didn't deserve this. Even the most confused and lost girl, even the most screwed up of us all, doesn't deserve this. Death isn't the consequence for making a mistake; it's the punishment we force on girls because they couldn't be good. Only girls have to die for wanting.”
― T.E. Carter, I Stop Somewhere

tags: consequence-of-actions, i-stop-somewhere, judgement, justification-of-abuse, slut-shaming, t-e-carter

20 likes

#14

“Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.”
― Fiona Apple

235 likes

#15

“...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: abuse-survivors, abused-child, abusive-parents, betrayal, betrayal-trauma, child-abuse, complex-ptsd, coping, defense-mechanism, helpelessness, out-of-control, overwhelmed, overwhelming, parental-abuse, personality, personality-disorders, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, posttraumatic-stress-disorder, powerlessness, psychological-defence, ptsd, terrifying, trauma, traumatic-experiences, traumatized, trust, unsafe, untrustworthy

149 likes

#16

“The cognitive style of individuals with paranoid personality disorder deserves special mention. Overtly, they have a legalistic bent, sharp attention, rich vocabulary, hypervigilance, and a tendency toward perceptual hairsplitting; they often possess striking oratorial skills. Covertly, however, they are unable to grasp the “big picture.” They readily dismiss the obvious, including any evidence that is contradictory to their preexisting beliefs. Their attention is narrow and biased. They are experts in seeing the “truth” but almost always fail to grasp the “whole truth.”
― Salman Akhtar, Quest for Answers: A Primer of Understanding and Treating Severe Personality Disorders

tags: evidence, hypervigilance, paranoia, personality-disorder, the-truth

1 likes

#17

“The cardinal feature of antisocial personality disorder is an incapacity for experiencing genuine inner guilt and the associated lack of concern for others. Individuals with antisocial personality display a predominantly narcissistic orientation in which even the seeming islands of devotion hide selfish motives. They have an excessive sensitivity to displeasure, an 'addiction to novelty,' and a highly cynical view of the world.
Their self-concept is that of a victim and an exception to ordinary social rules.”
― Salman Akhtar, Quest for Answers: A Primer of Understanding and Treating Severe Personality Disorders

tags: addiction-to-novelty, antisocial-personality-disorder, lack-of-concern, narcissism-cynical

1 likes

#18

“In essence, schizoid personality disorder is overtly characterized by social withdrawal, interpersonal detachment, solitariness in vocational and recreational choices, asexuality, idiosyncratic morality, and absentmindedness. Covertly, however, the schizoid individual is exquisitely sensitive, emotionally needy, acutely observant, creative, often perverse, and vulnerable to corruption. The avoidance of and the need for others, the callous persona and the inner sensitivity, and the absent-mindedness and vigilance are various facets of the same condition. The tension between these extremes is the heart of the schizoid pathology.”
― Salman Akhtar, Quest for Answers: A Primer of Understanding and Treating Severe Personality Disorders

tags: asexuality, callous-persona, schizoid, schizoid-personality-disorder, sensitivity, social-withdrawal

4 likes

#19

“Abuse and respect are diametric opposites: You do not respect someone whom you abuse, and you do not abuse someone whom you respect.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

tags: abuse, opposites, relationship, respect

128 likes

#20

“IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

tags: abuse, abused-women, abuser, abusers, abusive-men, abusive-partner, abusive-partners, abusive-relationship, abusive-relationships, domestic-abuse, domestic-violence, emotional-abuse, mental-abuse, physical-abuse, psychological-abuse

116 likes

#21

“When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn’t find a whore in all of Paris. They were too busy paying their respects. That was a man – and he still has a show on in the West End.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

tags: paris, victor-hugo, west-end, whore

2 likes

#22

“There is stability in self-destruction, in prolonging sadness as a means of escaping abstractions like happiness. Rock bottom is a surprisingly comfortable place to lay your head. Looking up from the depths of another low often seems a lot safer than wondering when you'll fall again. Falling feels awful.

I'd rather fucking fly.”
― Kris Kidd

tags: depression, mental-illness, self-destruction, self-sabotage

41 likes

#23

“But when I was a prostitute I protected myself, fought back at every moment, was never off guard. To protect my deeper, inner self from men, I offered them only an outer shell. I kept my heart and soul, and let my body plat its role, its passive, inert, unfeeling role. I learnt to resist by being passive, to keep myself whole by offering nothing, to live by withdrawing to a world of my own. In other words, I was telling the man he could have my body, he could have a dead body, but he would never be able to make me react, or tremble, or feel either pleasure or pain. I made no effort, expended no energy, gave no affection, provided no thought. I was therefore never tired or exhausted.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

tags: emotions, feelings, love, men, power, prostitution, relationships, soul

2 likes

#24

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

973 likes

#25

“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

442 likes

#26

“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”
― Stephen King

tags: stephen-king

506 likes

#27

“It was just regular growing up, of course, the kind everyone does - but it still hurt him, I know, like the memory I have of the time he dropped me off at the train station when I was going back to Chicago. I could see him through the window of the train, but he couldn't see me through the tinted glass.

I waved, trying to get his attention as he walked up and down the platform trying to figure out where I was sitting. From up in the train, he looked so small. If he'd seen me, he would have smiled and waved, but he didn't know I could see him, and the sadness on his face was exposed to me then. He looked lost. He stood there on the platform a long time, even after my train started pulling away, still trying to catch a glimpse of me waving back.”
― Catherine Chung, Forgotten Country

tags: fathers-and-daughters

22 likes

#28

“I’d always known I would be a parent someday, I’d never for one second imagined having a girl. By no means am I a cigar-chomping, NASCAR-watching, Sunday-afternoon-armchair-quarterback kind of guy, but what could I ever offer a daughter? How to tune a kick drum and catalog her Slayer bootlegs? I was at a loss. And then, as she had always done, my mother imparted a little bit of her well-earned wisdom that has since proven to be one of my life’s most indisputable truths: “The relationship between a father and daughter can be one of the most special relationships in any girl’s life.”
― Dave Grohl, The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music

tags: fathers-and-daughters

2 likes

#29

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
― Maurice Sendak

877 likes

#30

“You know all the ways you can kill a girl?

God, there are so many.”
― Courtney Summers, All the Rage

tags: contemp-ya, contemporary, sexual-assault, ya-lit

140 likes

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