Ellen Chernevych > Ellen's Quotes

“What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”
― Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition

“we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“terror finally becomes almost
bearable
but never quite

terror creeps like a cat
crawls like a cat
across my mind”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“You're thinking about something, and it makes you forget to talk.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”
― Jean Cocteau

“I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”
― Angela Carter

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security. ”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.”
― Federico Garcia Lorca

“I put my head
out of my window and see
how much the wind’s knife
wants to slice it off.
On this unseen
guillotine, I’ve placed
the eyeless head
of all my desires.”
― Federico García-Lorca

“My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills

“I am not out to destroy all the white race — only a small part of it: myself.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills

“So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ...”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.”
― Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I am too sick to lay down
the sidewalks frighten me
the whole damned city frightens me,
what I will become
what I have become
frightens me.”
― Charles Bukowski, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck

“Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.”
― Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit