Hannah > Hannah's Quotes

“But you cant shut everyone out. I mean you have to have someone to love. . .someone to hold on to. . . someone--”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

“After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

“Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”
― Doris Lessing

“Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”
― Doris Lessing

“I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.”
― Doris Lessing

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world...”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it”
― Flannery O' Connor, Wise Blood

“Truth-telling is difficult because the varieties of untruth are so many and so well disguised. Lies are hard to identify when they come in the form of apparently innocuous imprecision, socially acceptable slippage, hyperbole masquerading as enthusiasm, or well-placed propaganda. These forms of falsehood are so common, and even so normal, in media-saturated, corporately controlled culture that truth often looks pale, understated, alarmist, rude, or indecisive by comparison. Flannery O’Connor’s much-quoted line ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd’ has a certain prophetic force in the face of more and more commonly accepted facsimiles of truth - from PR to advertising claims to propaganda masquerading as news.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
― Anais Nin

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
― Virginia Woolf

“I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”
― Harry Crews

“survival is triumph enough.”
― Harry Crews

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”
― Susan Sontag

“Something caught in her throat at this second thanks, when she'd threatened him so brutally. When you're a monster, she thought, you are thanked and praised for not behaving like a monster. She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.”
― Kristin Cashore, Graceling