Dana Jerman > Dana's Quotes

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
― Theodor Adorno

“What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret. ”
― Gail Sher

“Young people want mirrors. Older people want art.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Burnt Tongues

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“I search—looking inward past glued pieces of
watermelon shells harboring vestiges of what I thought 
was once a lush field of texts and subtexts—for that 
nameless creative spirit who haunts me still.
Somewhere along 
this ascending slope, though, the writer I have
 strived to become has lost his way while attempting to
 explore a labyrinth of ideas. Perhaps that creative creature has merely spent too much time theorizing
 about the petroglyphs surrounding him, thinking that
 they are subtle clues for the most direct route to
 freedom.”
― M. A. Feltman, 2002

“It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.”
― Annie Lennox

“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“I’m not big on meeting new people, especially new people I’m never going to see again. There’s all kinds of uninteresting, insincere banter, I have to pretend to be a nice person, and because 96 percent of the world’s population are dim bulbs, odds are excellent that I’ll be stuck in the middle of a Spontaneous Freak Encounter.”
― Laurie Notaro, I Love Everybody

“...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”
― Stokely Carmichael

“I laughed with the sheer joy of controlling this beautiful creation, and I did not mind that there came an echoing laugh from somewhere just outside my awareness. For once that woman was no threat but a partner and I allowed her a share in my pleasure. I did not know, yet, just how dangerous she was.”
― Helen Susan Swift, Dark Voyage

“IN THE SHADE OF THE house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman. The sun tanned his light shoulders by the banks of the river when bathing, performing the sacred ablutions, the sacred offerings. In the mango grove, shade poured into his black eyes, when playing as a boy, when his mother sang, when the sacred offerings were made, when his father, the scholar, taught him, when the wise men talked. For a long time, Siddhartha had been partaking in the discussions of the wise men, practising debate with Govinda, practising with Govinda the art of reflection, the service of meditation. He already knew how to speak the Om silently, the word of words, to speak it silently into himself while inhaling,”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“A part of me was always aware of how painful it would feel after the happiness wore off. So I was never really happy, like, ever.”
― Jade Sharma, Problems

“...what one ought to capture in beauty is that which is treacherous and irresistible...”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“Companions in pathos,who barely murmur,go with your lamp spent and return the jewels. A new mystery sings in your bones. Cultivate your legitimate strangeness.”
― René Char

“Sometimes isolation can be shared.”
― Ken Grimwood, Replay

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“Boo, Forever

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.”
― Richard Brautigan, The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster

“Beware:
Ignorance
Protects itself.
Ignorance
Promotes suspicion.
Suspicion
Engenders fear.
Fear quails,
Irrational and blind,
Or fear looms,
Defiant and closed.
Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“​You might have to hurt yourself if you want to really be alone for a little while.”
― Peter Derk, Dear Runaway: a novel in letters

“We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”
― Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

“See, this business is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers.”
― Marsellus Wallace

“Wasn’t the whole point to build a bridge out of
convictions, strong enough to span the gap between what one knows and what one believes?”
― Mark A. Henry, Lacking Evidence to the Contrary: A Lowbrow Novel of Questionable Necessity