Todd > Todd's Quotes

“Why do people think being with someone is the answer to everything?”
― Elizabeth Scott, Love You Hate You Miss You

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
― Rumi

“It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“Not caring for their lives' is it?
Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.”
― Marcel Proust

“You wreck me.”
― S.C. Stephens, Thoughtless

“... novels contained something inexpressibly delicious.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Alyosha was certain that no one in the whole world ever would want to hurt him, and what is more, he knew that no one could hurt him. This was for him an axiom, assumed once and for all without question. And he went his way without hesitation, relying on it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement...”
― Virginia Woolf

“When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real love it. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter - as I did!”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it they endeavour to impersonate, to identify with, the wicked, and to make their partners do likewise, in order to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders

“It would be the height of absurdity to label ignorance tempered by humility "faith"!
(Institutio III.2.3)”
― John Calvin

“Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives