Laurie Hertz-Kafka > Laurie's Quotes

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.”
― David Lynch

“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me!”
― David Lynch

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.”
― David Lynch

“I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force--a wild pain and decay--also accompanies everything.”
― David Lynch

“We all want expanded consciousness and bliss. It's a natural, human desire. And a lot of people look for it in drugs. But the problem is that the body, the physiology, takes a hard hit on drugs. Drugs injure the nervous system, so they just make it harder to get those experiences on your own.
I have smoked marijuana, but I no longer do. I went to art school in the 1960s, so you can imagine what was going on. Yet my friends were the ones who said, "No, no, no, David, don't you take those drugs." I was pretty lucky.
Besides, far more profound experiences are available naturally. When your consciousness stars expanding, those experiences are there. All those things can be seen. It's just a matter of expanding that ball of consciousness. And the ball of consciousness can expand to be infinite and unbounded. It's totality. You can have totality. So all those experiences are there for you, without the side effects of drugs.”
― David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.”
― Gore Vidal, Screening History

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”
― Émile Zola

“Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“I sat down and remembered a saying Old Aunt used to tell me whenever I complained that I had been wrongly accused: “Don’t strike a flea on a tiger’s head.” Don’t settle one trouble only to make a bigger one.”
― Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

“XXIX

Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.

Traveller, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”
― Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“For she would willingly have slept, but since the night is free pasturage, a limitless field, since night is unmoulded richness, one must tunnel into its darkness. One must hang it with jewels. Night was shared in secret, day browsed on by the whole flock.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.”
― James Baldwin , Giovanni’s Room

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”
― James Baldwin, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon

“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.”
― James Baldwin

“What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.”
― Annie Proulx

“Where are the reporters of yesteryear?' he muttered, 'the nail biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write?”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it—even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.”
― Annie Proulx, Barkskins

“Are you like an enchanted thing? A damn story where some girl lets a warty old toad sleep in her shoe and in the mornin the toad's a good-lookin dude makin omelettes?”
― E. Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories

“As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped. After”
― Annie Proulx, Barkskins

“Well known how violent it is in the States. Worst you'll get here,' said Jack, 'is a good punch-up and maybe your car pushed over the cliff.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“If the world is insane then you'd be a fool to try and look for sanity to answer the call.”
― Walter Mosley, Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large