Summer > Summer's Quotes

“Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
― Isaac Asimov

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
― Socrates

“The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.”
― Angela Carter

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school,athletics,artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school,drop out,quit jobs,leave lovers,move,lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather,we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule,most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place.”
― Marya Hornbacher

“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“I do not remember very many things from the inside out. I do not remember what it felt like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

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

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

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
― Virginia Woolf