ialen > ialen's Quotes

“I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Bessie: 'Why don't you get married?'
Zooey: 'I like riding in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window anymore when you're married.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The phrase 'see attached bibliography' is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“But, you know, that feeling? When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It's good. Even when it's bad, it's good.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.
As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I recorded it. In my heart.”
― Asumiko Nakamura, Classmates

“If you do not want to write, at least spit on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and send it to me. You are not taking any notice of me at all. God forgive you – all I wanted was a few words from you.”
― Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

“You kiss the back of my legs and I want to cry. Only the sun has come this close, only the sun.”
― Shauna Barbosa, Cape Verdean Blues

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Please, Erno. It’s Sunday. It’s evil to discuss money on the Sabbath,
don’t you know?’
‘It’s Tuesday, my lord,’ Erno muttered.
‘Every day is Sunday in God’s kingdom.’
‘Then when would we work?’
‘Please, Erno. Clod needs to concentrate.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

“I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.

Or when you’re away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions – sugar? – milk? –
and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say
but it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.

- Tea”
― Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture

“What will you do now with the gift of your left life?”
― Carol Ann Duffy, The Bees

“Better off dead than giving in; not taking what you want.”
― Carol Ann Duffy, Selling Manhattan

“It took ten years
In the woods to tell that a mushroom
Stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
Are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
Howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason.”
― Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife

“At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,

my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes

but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –

which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

But then I was young – and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe

to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

Little Red-Cap”
― Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife

“What about heaven, Ina? Don’t you want to go?’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I won’t know anyone.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

“All that matters is that you want me.
Say the word & I’ll burn for ten days.”
― Yves Olade, Bloodsport

“... it is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on Earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

“I know it is my father's first time on this Earth, too. And I know He had it worse when he was little. But I was little too”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

“At times I imagine the map of the world laid out and you stretched across it. And all that is left for my life are the areas you don’t cover or can’t reach.”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

“Probably I am constitutionally not lazy at all, but there was nothing for me to do.”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
― John Anster, The First Part Of Goethe's Faust

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

-Mr. Darcy”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“A girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then.
It is something to think of”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice