Johannah Gage > Johannah's Quotes

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all. No... not the artful postures of love, not playful and poetical games of love for the amusement of an evening, but love that... overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable - like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.”
― Marc Norman, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay

“I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? ”
― Virginia Woolf

“Sometimes you will never know the value of something,until it becomes a memory.”
― Dr. Seuss

“I’d always secretly believed that a love as fierce and true as mine would be rewarded in the end, and now I was being forced to accept the bitter truth.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“I´ve always wanted him to love me the way I loved him. He did love me, I know he did. Just not the way I wanted him to.

"And it´s so different for a lot of people I´ve known. One partner doesn´t love the other enough to stop drinking, or gambling, or running around with other women. One is the giver and one is the taker. The giver wishes the taker would stop."

"But the taker never changes," Luke says, though he wonders if this is always the case.

"Sometimes the giver has to let go, but sometimes you don´t. You can´t. I couldn´t give up on Jonathan. I seemed to be able to forgive him anything.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“We were arrogant and naive, thinking we knew what we felt then was love. Love can be a cheap emotion, lightly given, thought it didn´t seem so to me at the time. Looking back, I know we were only filling in the holes in our soles, the way the tide rushes sand to fill in the crevices of a rocky shore. We-or maybe it was just I-bandaged our needswith what we declared was love. But, eventually, the tide draws out what it has swept in.”
― Alma Katsu, The Taker

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics

“This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place . . . and the world waits while she powders her nose.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be”
― Joyce Carol Oates, After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“Those who too patiently serve as props sometimes underrate the possibilities of the vine.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet; other times I think it's being gulped down in huge, Jaws-shaped chunks. In those quaint days before the internet, once you made it to your desk there wasn't much to distract you. You could sit there working or you could just sit there. Now you sit down and there's a universe of possibilities – many of them obscurely relevant to the work you should be getting on with – to tempt you. To think that I can be sitting here, trying to write something about Ingmar Bergman and, a moment later, on the merest whim, can be watching a clip from a Swedish documentary about Don Cherry – that is a miracle (albeit one with a very potent side-effect, namely that it's unlikely I'll ever have the patience to sit through an entire Bergman film again).

Then there's the outsourcing of memory. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of memorising passages of poetry and compiling detailed indexes in the backs of books of prose. So if there was a passage I couldn't remember, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now, in what TS Eliot, with great prescience, called "this twittering world", I just google the key phrase of the half-remembered quote. Which is great, but it's drained some of the purpose from my life.

Exactly the same thing has happened now that it's possible to get hold of out-of-print books instantly on the web. That's great too. But one of the side incentives to travel was the hope that, in a bookstore in Oregon, I might finally track down a book I'd been wanting for years. All of this searching and tracking down was immensely time-consuming – but only in the way that being alive is time-consuming.”
― Geoff Dyer

“People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories...”
― Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

“Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have...undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It's because he doesn't care! He's in a room with a naked girl, he just won the lottery. I am so tired of saying no, waking up in the morning and recalling every single thing I ate the day before, counting every calorie I consumed so I know just how much self loathing to take into the shower. I'm going for it. I have no interest in being obese, I'm just through with the guilt. So this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to finish this pizza, and then we are going to go watch the soccer game, and tomorrow we are going to go on a little date and buy ourselves some bigger jeans.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will.”
― Mary Stewart, The Hollow Hills

“Anni, amori e bicchieri di vino, nun se contano mai.”’ ‘“Years, lovers and glasses of wine; these things must not be counted.”
― Anthony Capella, The Food of Love

“Moreover, I have boundary issues with men. Or maybe that’s not fair to say. To have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place, right? But I disappear into
the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my
dog’s time—everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.
I do not relay these facts about myself with pride, but this is how it’s always been.
Some time after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, “You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you’re with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like
him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land