Clara > Clara's Quotes

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“I can excuse everything but boredom. Boring people don't have to stay that way. ”
― Hedy Lamarr

“why should we expect our collective memory – which we call history – to be any less fallible than our personal memory?”
― Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch

“We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that.”
― Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch

“For a woman, love has historically been a matter of possession followed by sacrifice: that’s to say, of being possessed and then of being sacrificed.”
― Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.”
― Hedy Lamarr

“I'm a sworn enemy of convention. I despise the conventional in anything, even the arts.”
― Hedy Lamarr

“Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves - living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.”
― Ali Smith, How to be Both

“Girl : do you hear me?
cause although it seemed to be the end of the world to me -
it wasn't.

There was a lot more world : cause roads that look set to take you in one direction will sometimes twist back on themselves without ever seeming anything other than straight, ... many things get forgiven in the course of a life : nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right.”
― Ali Smith, How to be Both

“I want to gain immortality because of my brain and not because of the potential of my womb.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“There are moments in life, so monumental and still, that the memory can never be retrieved without a catch to the throat or an interruption to the beat of the heart. Can never be retrieved without the rumbling disquiet of how close that moment came to not having happened at all.”
― Sarah Winman, Still Life

“No single act of generosity remains in isolation. The ripples are many.”
― Sarah Winman, Still Life

“Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world, Ulysses. It repositions our sight and judgement. Captures forever that which is fleeting.”
― Sarah Winman, Still Life

“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.”
― Rachel Cusk, Transit

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche