Alanna > Alanna's Quotes

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  • #1
    David Foster Wallace
    “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
    David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  • #2
    James Baldwin
    “Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
    James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  • #3
    David Foster Wallace
    “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
    David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

  • #4
    David Foster Wallace
    “... That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”
    David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  • #5
    Cristina Peri Rossi
    “No hay vidas livianas. Todas son difíciles de llevar.”
    Cristina Peri Rossi

  • #6
    James Baldwin
    “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
    James Baldwin

  • #7
    David Foster Wallace
    “That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.”
    David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  • #8
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke

  • #9
    Ta-Nehisi Coates
    “One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”
    Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

  • #10
    Pablo Neruda
    “No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
    o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:
    te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
    secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

    Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
    dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
    y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
    el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.

    Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
    te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
    así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,

    sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
    tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecha es mía,
    tan cerca que cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.”
    Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

  • #11
    David Foster Wallace
    “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
    David Foster Wallace

  • #12
    John Green
    “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
    John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

  • #13
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    “Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • #14
    Ta-Nehisi Coates
    “But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
    Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

  • #15
    Jeffrey Eugenides
    “Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”
    Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

  • #16
    Susan Sontag
    “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.”
    Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

  • #17
    David Foster Wallace
    “Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”
    David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  • #18
    James Baldwin
    “It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
    James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  • #19
    James Baldwin
    “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
    James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  • #20
    John Green
    “That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence”
    John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

  • #21
    John Green
    “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
    John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

  • #22
    David Foster Wallace
    “What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
    David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  • #23
    David Foster Wallace
    “If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
    David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

  • #24
    Rupi Kaur
    “i do not want to have you
    to fill the empty parts of me
    i want to be full on my own

    i want to feel so complete
    i could light a whole city
    and then
    i want to have you
    cause the two of
    us combined
    could set
    it on fire”
    Rupi Kaur

  • #25
    Milan Kundera
    “for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
    Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  • #26
    Jeffrey Eugenides
    “I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.”
    Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

  • #27
    Jeffrey Eugenides
    “Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”
    Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

  • #28
    Jeffrey Eugenides
    “All wisdom ends in paradox.”
    Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

  • #29
    James Baldwin
    “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”
    James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  • #30
    Jeffrey Eugenides
    “We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.”
    Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex



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