lionforreal > lionforreal's Quotes

“Speaking does harm, sows confusion and weakens things that are obvious. Speaking makes me tremble inside. I don't think I have ever said anything really important in my entire life -- there's a lack of words for the most important things anyway. (I must make a list of missing words -- top of it I'll put a verb that means something in between "I sense" and "I see.")”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I didn’t know you could get buried in your own silence.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“People think people are in charge, but they're wrong; it's the trees.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“We wish with our hands, that’s what we do as artists.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“I think you can sort of slip out of your life and it can be hard to find a way back in.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“And Agathon said, It is probable, Socrates, that I knew nothing of what I had said.

And yet spoke you beautifully, Agathon, he said.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

“We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream”
― Jack Kerouac

“My witness is the empty sky.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs

“Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.”
― william s. burroughs

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Your memory creates postcard images, but it doesn't really comprehend the world at all. That's why a landscape is so affected by the mood of the person looking at it. In it a person sees his own inner, transitory moments. Wherever he looks, he sees nothing but himself.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“This was how the end must look. No deluge, no rains of fire, no Auschwitz, no comet. This is how the world will look when God has deserted it, whoever he is. Like an abandoned house, everything coated in cosmic dust, muggy and steeped in silence. Everything living will congeal and grow mold in the light that has no pulse and therefore is dead. In this spectral light everything will crumble.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“Quite out of the blue a bizarre and compelling idea came into my head today: that we have ended up as human beings through forgetfulness, through lack of attention, and that in reality we are creatures participating in a vast, cosmic battle that has probably been going on since time immemorial and which, for all we know, may never end. All we see of it are glimmers, in blood-red moons, in fires and gales, in frozen leaves that fall in October, in the jittery flight of a butterfly, in the irregular pulse of time that can lengthen a night into infinity or come to a violent stop each day at noon. I am actually an angel or a demon sent into the turmoil of one life on a sort of mission, which is either carrying itself out without my help, or else I have totally forgotten about it. This forgetfulness is part of the war--it's the other side's weapon, and they've attacked me with it so that I'm wounded, invalided out of the game for a while. As a result, I don't know how powerful or how weak I am--I don't know anything about myself because I can't remember anything, and that's why I don't try to look for either weakness or power in myself. It's an extraordinary feeling--to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn't make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof