Colin Eilers > Colin's Quotes

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Disappear Here.
The syringe fills with blood.
You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.
Wonder if he's for sale.
People are afraid to merge. To merge.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior [to men] and always have been.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Without literature, life is hell.”
― Charles Bukowski

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ”
― William S. Burroughs

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”
― Margaret Atwood

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”
― John Updike

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
― John Updike, Self-Consciousness

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

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

“We must travel in the direction of our fear.”
― John Berryman

“Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.”
― Tom Wolfe

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
― Mary Oliver

“If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

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

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.”
― Anne Sexton

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”
― Ted Hughes

“Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.”
― Thom Gunn

“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.”
― W.S. Merwin

“A BIRTHDAY

Something continues and I don't know what to call it
though the language is full of suggestions
in the way of language
but they are all anonymous
and it's almost your birthday music next to my bones

these nights we hear the horses running in the rain
it stops and the moon comes out and we are still here
the leaks in the roof go on dripping after the rain has passed
smell of ginger flowers slips through the dark house
down near the sea the slow heart of the beacon flashes

the long way to you is still tied to me but it brought me to you
I keep wanting to give you what is already yours
it is the morning of the mornings together
breath of summer oh my found one
the sleep in the same current and each waking to you

when I open my eyes you are what I wanted to see.”
― W.S. Merwin