Armen > Armen's Quotes

“Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form: my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists, drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there.”
― David Wojnarowicz

“It's no secret, of course, that souls sometimes die within a person and are replaced by others — especially with age.”
― Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

“Power lacks moral or principles. It only has interests.”
― Horacio Castellanos Moya

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Unpopular, lonely and loving, Elinor need not trouble, For if she were not so loving, She would not be so miserable.”
― Stevie Smith, Selected Poems of Stevie Smith

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
― Maurice Sendak

“A man was the cause of it.
An unarmed man with a weapon.”
― Frank O'Hara

“It passes, but it does not pass away.”
― Laszlo Krasznahorkai

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.”
― Aidan Chambers, Postcards from No Man's Land

“Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.”
― Christopher Isherwood

“Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?"

"Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel."

"And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“You have so many layers, that you can peel away a few, and everyone's so shocked or impressed that you're baring your soul, while to you it's nothing, because you know you've twenty more layers to go.”
― Craig Thompson, Carnet de Voyage

“Finding is losing something else.
I think about, perhaps even mourn,
what I lost to find this”
― Richard Brautigan, Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork

“Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.”
― W.B. Yeats, Dyland Thomas T.S. Eliot

“I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s.”
― Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower

“Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one world's better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems

“With madness, as with vomit, it's the passerby who receives the inconvenience.”
― Joe Orton

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“The Jewel

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.”
― James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break

“Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom. ”
― James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems

“Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Can you be happy when you are unhappy?”
― Jon Fosse, Nightsongs

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Not because of me, not because of you, just that the summer, embracing both of us together, put me so close to you there could be no escape.”
― Natalya Gorbanevskaya