Suzanne > Suzanne's Quotes

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you. ”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs Of A Geisha, Memoirs of a Geisha

“You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Hatsumomo's lovely smille grew... until her lips were as rich and full as drops of blood beading at the edge of a wound”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― David Foster Wallace

“How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral's Kiss

“With wild eyes that had seen freedom.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“The vulnerability we experience allows us a different experience of love. It is an act of generosity to let people be close to us, and we try to understand that they, too, are going through feelings about what’s happening.”
― Narcotics Anonymous, Living Clean: The Journey Continues

“I smiled as our hands pressed against one another in midair, as though we were pretending to touch through invisible glass. We managed a long stare before Jack finally blushed, retracting his hands. “How old are you, Jack Patrick?” “I turned fourteen this summer,” he said. I gave an impressed nod, indicating this was no small accomplishment. “Well you’re certainly old enough to know what you like.” Principal Deegan’s first-day speech came back to mind; I had to bite my lip not to jokingly add in, Am I right? “Here, let me give you some examples. Do you like it when girls wear lipstick?” He blushed and nodded. “Yeah.” His voice had an embarrassed tone, like he’d just made a vile confession. “Good—do you like lighter lipstick? Darker lipstick? Red?” I wanted to grab his hand again. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to slide my fingers beneath the desk and touch the bare skin of his leg. “Um,” he said. His hand began to scratch at his scalp. “Wait,” I said. “I have an idea.” I walked up to my desk and grabbed my purse and a box of Kleenex. “So what I’m wearing now is called fuchsia. Kind of a bright pink.” I sat and wiped it off, then took the fuchsia tube of lipstick out of my purse along with two others. “Okay, ready?” He nodded with sudden animation—we were about to play a game.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“I won't tell," he said, his arms holding my waist with amateur stiffness. I smiled, thinking about the lover he'd become and all the things he'd try with me for the very first time. I'd be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he'd have afterwards would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naivety would be subtracted from my experience to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“Like most pronounced flaws, it did not live in isolation.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“Despite being told he could step down, Jack stayed for a moment,crying, then looked over at me. It wasn't at all the look of hatred I'd expected. Instead it was a look of mutual knowledge, Jack conveying to me his new understanding that the world could be a terrible place. His eyes said that no one at all was looking out for him or able to fix this essential flaw in life's fabric; my eyes stared back and told him that he was right.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”
― Rumi