alexis > alexis's Quotes

“But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
― Diane Arbus

“his apricock.”
― André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

“She always wept because she slept alone, Now she sleeps among the dead.”
― André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Reva often spoke about 'settling down.' That sounded like death to me.

'I'd rather be alone than anybody's live-in prostitute,' I said to Reva.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Ever think he’s too good to be true? Sam had asked the day I showed her the cake topper. I wished she’d never asked that question.”
― Greer Hendricks, The Wife Between Us

“You need to remember that even when I’m not there, I’m always with you.”
― Greer Hendricks, The Wife Between Us

“There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.”
― Alice Munro

“But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“This business of womanhood is a heavy burden.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga

“Not a chance. I don’t want her to realize the truth; I’d rather she live forever in her mind, beautiful and whole.”
― Chi Ta-wei, The Membranes

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“We don’t know enough about ourselves. I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Everybody has to die. I prefer to die for a crime I have committed rather than to die for one of the crimes which you have committed.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”
― Anais Nin, Henry & June

“You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, "You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“It was a light that shone over our faces, our wounds and scars. It was a light so brilliant and white it could have been beamed from heaven, and Brian and I could have been angels, basking in it. But it wasn’t, and we weren’t.”
― Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin