Lily > Lily's Quotes

“If you want a thing--truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything,
without having to say that I ran out into the street to prove something,
that he didn't love me,
that I wanted to be possessed, thrown over, that I wanted to have the wounds
nailed shut.
I want to tell you this story without having to be in it:
Max in the wrong clothes. Max at the party, drunk again.
Max in the kitchen, in refrigerator Ught, his hands around the neck of a beer.
Tell me we're dead and I'll love you
even more.
I'm surprised that I say it with feeling.
There's a thing in my stomach about this. A simple thing. The last rung.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev. Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“manuscripts don't burn" - "(рукописи не горят)”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.
As a counselor once told me -a counselor for Disaffected Yought, I might add: "You like that crap because it reminds you of you." Couldn't of said it better or put it more bluntly. Don't even disagree with it either.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“It's enough to just do what I want. Fate either never existed at all—or it's something I should trample beneath my feet.”
― Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong, Vol. 2

“I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. “I am alone and they are EVERYONE,” I thought—and pondered. From”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Life has suddenly become overcrowded. Too many people I can care for are swarming in and filling up my chest. Too many things I want to do are rushing headlong into my new life for reasons unknown to me. All of a sudden my new life is like a field overgrown with strange flowers and exotic grasses or the shimmering, starry sky of my unbridled imagination...”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Maybe he decided that his sadness was going to be my companion forever, for as long as he wanted, because sad people are merciless.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Things We Lost in the Fire

“It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this—it didn’t matter. I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

“But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“I could wish for nothing more than to die for a childish dream in which I truly believed.”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis