Hannah > Hannah's Quotes

“When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.”
― Bette Davis

“Banality is sometimes striking.”
― Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

“I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Pouvoir, au milieu de la folie, redevenir humaine”
― Marguerite Duras

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“Life: I'll never understand it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. [...] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
― Anais Nin

“I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”
― Anais Nin

“As a matter of fact," the other voice went on, "if you do tie her up from time to time, or whip her just a little, and she begins to like it, that’s no good either. You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears.”
― Pauline Réage, Histoire d'O | Story of O

“I think about you. But I don't say it anymore.”
― Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

“I am a very boring and unpleasant man, drowned in literature... But I love you.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera

“Monsters don't die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity's infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.”
― Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

“Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

“I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.”
― James Baldwin, A Dialogue

“I am imprisoned by devotion. I shy away from people. I am alone. I fall into obsession.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.”
― Jean Renoir