Anu Priya > Anu's Quotes

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso

“The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“People will selectively use “tradition” to justify anything.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“Don't ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box. Don't do that.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Make them pay you what they would pay a white man.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
― Madonna

“No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you've come from, you can always change, become a better version of yourself.”
― Madonna

“To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return. To just give. That takes courage, because we don't want to fall on our faces or leave ourselves open to hurt.”
― Madonna

“I laugh at myself.
I don't take myself completely seriously.
I think that's another quality that people have to hold on to... you have to laugh, especially at yourself.”
― Madonna

“Sick and perverted always appeals to me.”
― Madonna

“A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don't get what they want.”
― Madonna

“There's no such thing as the perfect soulmate. If you meet someone and you think they're perfect, you better run as fast as you can in the other direction. 'Cos your soulmate is the person that pushes all your buttons, pisses you off on a regular basis, and makes you face your shit.”
― Madonna

“I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.”
― Madonna

“I can tell you that being alive overwhelms me every hour on the hour and that is sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes nothing.”
― Kalyn Roseanne Livernois, High Wire Darlings

“Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”
― Terence McKenna

“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”
― Terence McKenna

“people always say that it hurts at night
and apparently screaming into your pillow at 3am
is the romantic equivalent of being heartbroken.
but sometimes
it’s 9am on a tuesday morning
and you’re standing at the kitchen bench waiting for the toast to pop up

and the smell of dusty sunlight and earl gray tea makes you miss him so much
you don’t know what to do with your hands.”
― rosie scanlan

“All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans