Monica Fox > Monica's Quotes

“It isn't ever delicate to live.”
― Kay Ryan

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms...”
― Anna Akhmatova

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Live steady. Don't fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth -- including people. It's not worth it. I learned this the hard way, through brutal overindulgence.

...Back to Chicago; it's never dull out there. You never know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town, but you can always count on *something*. Every time I go to Chicago I come away with scars.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“Fuck me. I'm so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.
Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.
What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”
― Sylvia Plath

“At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day.

Then I knew what the problem was.

I needed experience.

How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“Will you love me in December as you do in May?”
― Jack Kerouac

“I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.”
― Tennessee Williams

“I hope to die in my sleep, when the time comes, and I hope it will be in the beautiful big brass bed in my New Orleans apartment, the bed which is associated with so much love.”
― Tennessee Williams

“It's almost impossible for anybody to believe that they're not loved by someone they believe they love. But honey, I love nobody.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana

“-The little comfort of love?
-Is that comfort so little?
-Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.”
― Tenesse Williams

“Security is a kind of death.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather.
Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?
Byron:Make a departure.
Gutman:From yourself?
Byron:From my present self to myself as I used to be!
Gutman:That's the furthest departure a man could make!”
― Tenesse Williams

“I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I’ll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I’ll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain.”
― Tennessee Williams, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays

“When was the last time someone ran their fingers through the knots of your soul?”
― Maza Dohta

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
― John Muir

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”
― John Muir

“The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.”
― O. Henry

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
― anaïs nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

“To you, whoever you are, when I am gone — remember to be kind tonight to some lonely person. For me.”
― Tennessee Williams, Notebooks