_z > _z's Quotes

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.”
― Amy Bloom

“Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano.
What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.”
― David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

“You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.”
― David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

“But I don't belong to any one, therefore attachment to
anything means betrayal, self-banishment, renounce self-continuity, self-transcendence;
the ego only there to give significance”
― Ann Quin, Berg

“As the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio famously said, “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“I want to go to sleep and wake up and not be a terrible person.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“Anything you do every day—that's your life.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Any Person Is the Only Self

“I don't want to feel good, I want to feel sad. Happiness lately feels mostly beside the point.

It's not that I think I deserve punishment. Just weird fleeting wishes for tragedy.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“Do our experiences belong to us? Are they a property, “like a hat”? (Wittgenstein says no.) Do you have to pay attention to your own desires, which you do not own, to be mindful? Can you not pay attention to your desires? Will attention excite or assuage my desire? (You can’t observe X without changing X.) I don’t care. I want to change my mind.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.

Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Being in love is an emotional and obsessive experience. However, emotions change and obsessions fade. Research indicates that the average life span of the "in love" obsession is two years. For some it may last a bit longer; for some, a bit less. But the average is two years. Then we come down off the emotional high and those aspects of life that we disregarded in our euphoria begin to become important. Our differences begin to emerge and we often find ourselves arguing with the person whom we once though to be perfect. We have now discovered for ourselves that being in love is not the foundation for a happy marriage.”
― Gary Chapman

“Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Well-Being: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology

“A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“You'd be surprised what people will do for money that they wouldn't do for
love.

Myrnin.”
― Rachel Caine, Bite Club

“Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”
― Zadie Smith

“maybe that’s why I’m drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin