elio > elio's Quotes

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“When I meet kids who suffer, I want to teach them everything I know about the world, which isn’t a lot, and basically amounts to: Go to Harvard. Make hella money. Read contracts before you sign them. Bring two tiny bottles of Kahlúa and a tiny bottle of mouthwash when you have to go with your parents to their biopsy results. I follow my own advice while trying to hold off on the suicidal ideation while trying to be as socially fucking mobile as socially fucking possible and then these kids fucking find me, and what do I do, but invite them into my heart and tell them, babes, go to school, climb the ranks, kill the salutatorian, make it look like an accident, and in your valedictory address, remind your school that cops are pigs, and ICE are Nazis, and you are John at the foot of the cross, Jesus’s most loved apostle, maybe his lover, and you’re in the holy word, escape to my home for some chamomile tea and RuPaul, there will always be room for you, I love you and forever will.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.
But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”
― André Aciman

“Pulvis et umbra sumus. (We are but dust and shadow.)”
― Horace, The Odes of Horace

“But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”
― Donna Tartt

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.”
― Mary Oliver

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
― Charles Bukowski

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again”
― Homer, The Iliad

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“And we, too, had a relationship—
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar