Taylor > Taylor's Quotes

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

“There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
― James Baldwin

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin

“To this day, watching a woman mindlessly tend to one thing while doing something else absorbs me. Like securing the backs of her earrings while wiggling her feet into her shoes. Like staring into some middle distance, where lines soften, and where she separates the relevant from the immaterial.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Even when I was nothing, I was arriving.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“The best ideas outrun me. That’s why I write.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
― Jeffery Eugenides

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.”
― Ali Smith

“She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl’s toughness. She has a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys' heads like a girl. She turned girls' heads like a boy. She made love like a boy. She made love like a girl. She was so boyish it was girlish, so girlish it was boyish, she made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree. I had simply never found someone so right. Sometimes this shocked me so much that I was unable to speak.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

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

“Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“(this is before we're living together, before we do the most faithful act of all, mix our separate books into one library)”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)”
― Patti Smith

“Paths that cross will cross again.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip, so if you're reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he'll read it. I have to be extremely funny and wonderful around him just to get his attention at all and it's a shame to let it all go for one person.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History