Emma > Emma's Quotes

“There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.”
― Tao Lin, Taipei

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“argued for an hour on the telephone. now looking at pictures of carbs”
― Megan Boyle, selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“There was one face that looked like another face before it and then another face that looked like the face before it. This went all the way back until the beginning of time. Who knew what this face would look like a thousand years from now. Me?”
― Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place

“Law is the ultimate science.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected with it, it lives in your brain forever.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I am a strict vegetarian...The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.”
― Vladmir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside

“We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside

“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situating him so squarely in the modern age could have affected me as much as learning this. He typed Zarathustra? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

“The world is full to brimming with its own shit. A little more from me won’t even make a difference—it’s only natural. It’s to be expected. I should put a lot of shit in the play, so it will be a multicolored shit.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

“Why are you all reading? I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

“SHEILA How can these artists we read about—who have been married five or six times—how can they have enough time for all that life, and also make art? MARGAUX And have a heroin addiction?”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

“I thought of something I learned from reading Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz. Crazy Horse believes that he will be victorious in battle, but if he stops to take spoils from the battlefield, he will be defeated. He tattoos lightning bolts on the ears of his horses so the sight of them will remind him of this as he rides. I tried to apply this lesson to the things at hand, careful not to take spoils that were not rightfully mine.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I’m always astonished whenever I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My desire for perfection should prevent me from ever finishing anything; it should prevent me even from starting.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“It is not tedium that one feels. It is not grief. It is the desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday’s lost life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Only when night comes do I feel, if not happiness, at least some kind of repose which I experience as contentment”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“don’t insult myself by giving to dreams a value they do not have, apart from that of being my personal theatre, just as I do not call wine (from which I still do not abstain) ‘food’ or ‘one of life’s necessities’.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet