Alatna > Alatna's Quotes

“It's fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.'
Because he got hurt?'
No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“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

“You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine – and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“He’s a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don’t put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“Do you know how you caught me, Will?'

'Good-bye, Dr. Lecter. You can leave messages for me at the number on the file.' Graham walked away.

'Do you know how you caught me?'

Graham was out of Lecter's sight now, and he walked faster toward the far steel door.

'The reason you caught me is that we're just alike' was the last thing Graham heard as the steel door closed behind him.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sometimes he wakes so far from himself that he can’t even remember who he is. “Where am I?” he asks, desperate, and then, “Who am I? Who am I?”
And then he hears, so close to his ear that it is as if the voice is originating inside his own head, Willem’s whispered incantation. “You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs.
“You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen.
“You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way.
“You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it.
“You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again.
“You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality––Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom––but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself––his very life––has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I have become lost to the world
In which I otherwise wasted so much time
It means nothing to me
Whether the world believes me dead
I can hardly say anything to refute it
For truly, I am no longer a part of the world.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life
the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.
& I was free.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“a loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call it Proof.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I was a boy, which meant I was a murderer of my childhood.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“You are something made, then made to survive—which means you are somebody’s son.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“I guess what I mean is that I ate the apple not because the man lied when he said I was born of his rib but that I wanted to fill myself with its hunger for the ground, where the bones of my people still dream of me.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Inside my head, the war is everywhere. I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“I'm not high, officer, I just don't believe in time”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else. To be a dam for damage. My shittyness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”
― Hermann Hesse , Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend