Cassy > Cassy's Quotes

“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.”
― Jenny Holzer

“You won't find the same person twice, not even in the same person.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“Will I be something?
Am I something?
And the answer comes:
You already are.
You always were.
And you still have time to be.”
― Anis Mojgani

“Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“But if the devil were to see you, he would kiss your eyes and repent”
― Farouq Guwaidah

“And you became like the coffee,
In the deliciousness,
and the bitterness
and the addiction.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I sink into your eyes whenever I'm looking at you. and feel your eyes on me whenever I'm walking around the room and all the time I am aware, with a pride I can no longer contain, that I am living for you, that I am allowed to do so ......”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Marianne, he said, I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“You, who opened suns in my heart”
― Alfonsina Storni

“It's a nice big fat philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”
― Toni Morrison

“You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the
nature and quality of other people’s lives. Your errors may be irrevocable.
So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you
think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about
who lives and who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t will be
worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless.
You are not heartless. And you have time.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“all the women. in me. are tired.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, nejma

“I keep remembering — I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.”
― Henri Barbusse

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

“Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“And the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

(Popular misquote of "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.")”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“The Fourth Sign of The Zodiac (Part 3) by Mary Oliver

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
Mary oliver”
― Mary Oliver

“I made myself a promise: Even if it meant becoming a stranger to my loved ones, even if it meant keeping secrets, I would have a life of my own.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“I'm not too gone to be healed, am I?

I'm not too gone am I?”
― Alice Notley, In the Pines

“It’s spring, you’re young, you’re lovely, you have a right to be happy. Come back into the world.”
― Shirley Jackson

“All I ever wanted was to know what to do.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!