N.K. Layne > N.K.'s Quotes

“Body and soul can never be married

I need to become who I already am and will bellow forever at this incongruity which has committed me to hell”
― Sarah Kane

“God, who am I?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me. I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand of hieroglyphics the translations of external stimuli. How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? - - - That I have banged into and assimilated various things? That my environment and a chance combination of genes got me where I am?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Everything comes down so pasteurized
everything comes down 16 degrees
they say your amplifier is too loud
turn your amplifier down
are we high all alone on our knees
memory is just hips that swing
like a clock
the past projects fantastic scenes
tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc
fuck the clock!”
― Patti Smith, Babel

“Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much - then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about.

But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal.

Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Love is dope, not chicken soup.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Unfortunately, little darlings, there is no such thing as a simple love story.The most transitory puppy crush is complex to the extent of lying beyond the far reaches of the brain's understanding.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.”
― Nicole Krauss

“When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.'
If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?'
Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again.”
― Nicole Krauss

“How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY
Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920.
He died learning to walk.
He died standing at the blackboard.
And once, also, carrying a heavy tray.
He died practicing a new way to sign his name.
Opening a window.
Washing his genitals in the bath.
He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
Or he died thinking about Alma.
Or when he chose not to.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
― Albert Einstein

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
― Albert Einstein

“Black holes are where God divided by zero.”
― Albert Einstein

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“Mr. Constant," he said, "right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
― Kurt Vonnegut