TF > TF's Quotes

“But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.”
― Zadie Smith

“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“The less my hope, the hotter my love”
― Terence

“Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong?”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“Why do people think that we’re degraded when we’re examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation?”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“It was April the season of blood oranges, emotion running like the stream behind my house upstate, turbulent and thawing. I thought about how fragile people get when they withdraw from anything, how they become bloody yolks protected only by the thinnest shell”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“Friendship, as far as I'm concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that's built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and share commitments. It's a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It's something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“I need, therefore I imagine.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Writing is a struggle against silence.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas las familias felices

“Memory is satisfied desire.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“chaos: it has no plural.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down
and break your neck.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You've got an awfully kissable mouth.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls

“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, 'way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?" On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls

“Ours was a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken" --”
― F.Scott Fitzgerald

“I feared so-you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist."

"I'm not sentimental-I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last-the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise