Abbey > Abbey's Quotes

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
― Plutarch

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.”
― Donna Tartt

“Who was it that said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“He was a planet without an atmosphere.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

“All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone. Man's greatest suffering is born of mistreatment by his fellow man.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness worse.' I realize that's exactly what I did: I used love to fight illness, and it ruined me. I have to change my ways. I can't be like that anymore.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it's every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Like death, college serves as a kind of escape hatch. But while death takes you straight to the morgue, college is a single rope dangling loose from the inescapable net of society.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I became obsessed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. I devoured all kinds of books for tortured souls. Started collecting issues of the independence movement's weekly. Studied up on political game theory, an antidote to my spiritual reading. It made me feel like an outsider, which became my way of recharging. At the break of dawn, around six or seven like a nocturnal creature afraid of the light, I'd finally lay my head - which by then was spilling over with thoughts - down onto the comforter.
That's how it went when things were good.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Tarkovsky was right. The responsibility of the artist is to stir people’s hearts and minds toward loving others: to find the light and the true beauty of human nature within this love. Religion can rarely show us what fate means in concrete terms. Yet everyone needs to be understood and this understanding is found within each individual’s fate, one’s life journey that clarifies the way. I’m not a therapist or a philosopher or a priest. I’m an artist.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“...but I say whatever / one loves, is”
― Sappho, Poems and Fragments

“In Ancient Greek literature male poets tend not simply to portray women as lecherous but to attribute to them a species of lust different from that of males: a subhuman and automatic reflex, an animalistic urge. Sappho is important because she gives a fulle human voice to female desire for the first time in Western history. Since she defiantly chooses the quintessential love-object Helen of Troy as her freethinking agent, she seems fully conscious of the revolutionary claim she is making.”
― Sappho, Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments

“we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.”
― Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto

“My mother always told me that to be a girl one must be especially clever.”
― Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour

“When men are in the kitchen, it is considered work, and when women are in the kitchen it's considered duty. That's why there are so few women chefs in restaurants. The kitchen is hostile territory. It's a wonder nice things come out of it.”
― Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour

“Time spent with a cat is never wasted.”
― Colette

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

(Casual Chance, 1964)”
― Colette

“The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.”
― Colette

“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”
― Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

“To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one. ”
― Colette