morgan > morgan's Quotes

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Where does music go when it’s not playing?—she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Girls are given the weight of the world, but nowhere to put it down.”
― Tia Williams, Seven Days in June

“To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breathe and live. It is to admit and submit something which is on the outer limits of your understanding.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“For someone as controlled as I am, to experience the delight, the luxury, of being out of control, not to have an inkling of what’s around the next corner and to keep yourself constantly at risk, is simply pleasurable.”
― Paul Newman, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir

“I am delighted to discover that, even in the future, the English have not lost the art of ironic understatement,” he said without looking at me.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back,” she said quietly, and then met his eyes. “Whatever it saw or felt was so good that dying was worth it. The cat returns for more. Again and again. You know, nine lives and all that.”
― Tia Williams, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

“Hell no, how could I? I was communing with the divine.” She smiled wistfully, remembering. “I guess I’m not frightened by what I don’t understand.”
― Tia Williams, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet