Emilie > Emilie's Quotes

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I don't know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely”
― Sylvia Plath

“I weep because you cannot save people. You can only love them. You can’t transform them, you can only console them.”
― Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1937-1939

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.'
'They could be silent.'
'Like those two, at the next table?' Jean Marc laughed. 'Oh, no, no love can survive muteness.”
― Milan Kundera, Identity

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”
― Franz Kafka

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Husbands adored you, too, at least at first.
Being adored was something she had come to mistrust.
She felt adoration to be a small and lovely-looking bomb that could blow up in your face at any time.”
― Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I love you, but you don’t understand me, I’m a real poet!
My life is my poetry, my lovemaking is my legacy!”
― Lana Del Rey, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass

“Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

--The Sensible Thing”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”
― Andy Goldsworthy

“I was no longer needing to be special, because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe, like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is. Like storms, like roses. I was just part of it all.”
― Ram Dass, Changing Lenses

“Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever seen before.”
― Albert Einstein

“And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.”
― Clarice Lispector

“I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.

A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.

From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.

I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.

Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.”
― Richard Siken

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“I care about everything. Emotionalism and sensibility are my quicksands.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Seth,” she says, “wherever you are, it’s okay. You can come back from it. Whatever happened to you down there, whatever the world looks like now, that’s not how it always looks. That’s not how it’s always going to look. There’s more. There’s always more. Whatever you see, wherever you are, we’re still here with you. Me and Tommy.”
― Patrick Ness, More Than This

“I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“He figured out what he wanted to see by seeing himself."
(About Robert Mapplethorpe)”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa