MJ > MJ's Quotes

“To know and feel all this and not have the words to express it makes a human a grave of his own thoughts.”
― John Donne

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
― Nikki Giovanni

“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything
but grief.
If we could light up the room with pain,
we'd be such a
glorious fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism — to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.”
― Georges Bataille

“I am not a fool. I have just loved with an honest heart. Ask the moon and the night sky and these jungles, they will bear the testimony. But the world – that is a different matter.”
― Mukta Singh-Zocchi, The Thugs & a Courtesan

“we were never a match;
always a marvelous misfit.”
― Akif Kichloo, The Feeling May Remain

“When the night
comes to break my heart,
I think of you.”
― Akif Kichloo, The Feeling May Remain

“What if the poem loses?
What if it never tastes victory like the intent it was written with?”
― Akif Kichloo, Poems That Lose

“Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter's evening.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. ”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The streamers of my consciousness waver out and are perpetually torn and distressed by their disorder.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The common fund of experience is very deep.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire. The chair, the cup, the table-nothing remains unlit. All quivers, all kindles, all burns clear.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The earth hangs heavy beneath me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury--I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago...”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves