Null > Null's Quotes

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But when I lean over the chasm of myself—
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don’t know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I want to say something but shame
prevents me

yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things
and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say,
shame would not hold down your eyes
but rather you would speak about what is just”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“In fact she herself once blamed me
Kyprogeneia

because I prayed
this word:
I want.”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me -
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“I don't know what to do
two states of mind in me”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“you burn me”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“She wanted to go inside. She wanted to go in, wanting it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.”
― Georges Bataille

“Evil's just destructive? Then storms are evil, if it's that simple. And we have fire, and there there's hail. Underwriters lump it all under 'Acts of God.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness. Or perhaps, Starling thought, it excited him to see her marked in this particular way. She couldn't tell. The sparks in his eyes flew into his darkness like fireflies down a cave.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking. He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”
― Georges Bataille

“I imagine myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in agreement with the world, both as prey and as a jaw of time, which ceaselessly kills and is ceaselessly killed.”
― Georges Bataille

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“The Sorrow of Love
W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,
The full round moon and the star-laden sky,
And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves,
Had hid away earth’s old and weary cry.

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world’s tears,
And all the sorrows of her labouring ships,
And all the burden of her myriad years.

And now the sparrows warring in the eaves,
The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky,
And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves
Are shaken with earth’s old and weary cry.”
― Yeats

“You say my letter found you in a moment of hunger. How to say what it means to me, that I might have taught you this—shared it, somehow, infected you with it. I hope it isn't a burden at the same time that I want you to be seared by it. I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“… some men warm themselves at others' sins.”
― Maria McCann, As Meat Loves Salt

“Violent love eats up what it does love, and is mere appetite.”
― Maria McCann, As Meat Loves Salt

“But what virtue I do have is in me and of me. Men deny the good that comes from themselves, calling it God. So do they with their won evil, calling it the Devil.”
― Maria McCann, As Meat Loves Salt

“All words
In the dictionaries, letters, and novels
Died.
I want to discover
A way to love you
Without words.”
― Nizar Qabbani, Arabian Love Poems: Full Arabic and English Texts