Christina Ryan > Christina's Quotes

“I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.”
― Anaïs Nin

“With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.”
― Anaïs Nin, Little Birds

“Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable—like I'm about to cry any second—and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.”
― Andre Dubus III

“It is often difficult to admit that someone you love is not perfect, or to consider aspects of a person that are less than admirable.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“For our excess we lost everything.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“empty and closed, hovering in some frozen netherworld neither sun nor rain could thaw.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Crank

“You've got to kill your darlings.”
― Andre Dubus III

“How can someone so wonderful do something so terrible?”
― Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

“And that's what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet. You can wash it, and wash it, and still never forget what has transpired - a word which here means 'happened, and made everybody sad'.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
― Anais Nin

“if there is no feet at your feet, do not lift rocks at the side of the road.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don't care for spill orange soda all over themselves.”
― Lemony Snicket

“When I thought of the word "man," I could only think of those who could defend themselves and those they loved.”
― Andre Dubus III

“It’s easy K. on one side of the page you got your costs and on the other side your benefits. All you do is mark which one is which, then you weigh one side against the other and you get your decision just like that. that’s all you ever have to do. i live by this.”

"But what if you don’t know the difference between a benefit and a cost? what if you’ve never been very good at telling a plus from a minus?”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“If you don’t put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There’s the writer and there’s the author. The author—you don’t ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care—easier said than done. Accept that the world may never notice this thing you worked so hard at. And instead, do it for it, find a job, find a way of living that gives you an hour or two or three a day to do it, and then work your ass off sending out, trying to get out there, but do not put the pressure on the work to do something for you. Because then you’re going to be writing dishonestly and for the market instead of for the characters and your story.”
― Andre Dubus III

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
― Anais Nin

“Right, good temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room

“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight”
― Ezra Pound

“Whenever you are examining someone else's belongings, you are bound to learn many interesting things about the person of which you were not previously aware.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

“And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, "If you don't give me a basket of strawberries right now, I'm going to poke you with this large stick." But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.”
― Ezra Pound

“And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass”
― Ezra Pound

“No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”
― Ezra Pound

“Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.”
― Ezra Pound

“Rhythm must have meaning.”
― Ezra Pound

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.”
― Ezra Pound

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde