J.S.A. Lowe > J.S.A.'s Quotes

“From early on, we loved the broken-hearted,
And knew that home-life wasn't made for us.”
― Marina Tsvetaeva

“人烧成了灰，成分就跟磷灰石差不多，并没有什么值得敬畏的，为什么我们要把它当回事？为什么每年头尾都有个年节作为始终，为什么勾搭别人上床之前先得有个告白和压马路的过程？为什么合法同居除了有张证之外，还得邀请亲朋好友来做一个什么用也没有的仪式？因为生死、光阴、离合，都有人赋予它们意义，这玩意看不见摸不着，也不知有什么用，可是你我和一堆化学成分的区别，就在于这一点‘意义’。”
― Priest, 默读 [Mo Du] The Light in the Night

“The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“John," she said, "does it make every one—unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?" He paused and smiled. "I am afraid it does," he said.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“It was not always like this, of course. On occasion it's been worse.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet. ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“Craziness is what happens when there is no one left to whom you can tell the truth. You are left with all of it, alone.”
― Ann Wadsworth

“But now I know I was simply not cut out for life without her. I am living that life now and would not choose it.”
― Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty

“How preposterous and ruthless time is; just a slight hesitation, and it will strip your life down. You will be left heartbroken, and there will be no turning back.”
― priest, 镇魂

“No one survives life.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.”
― Denis Johnson, Angels

“If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.

Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

“I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel.…and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now.

The angel who says, “It’s time.”

“Is it time?” she asked. “Does it hurt?” He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen.

“Oh, babe.” The angel starts to cry. “You can’t imagine,” he said.”
― Denis Johnson, Angels

“A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life.”
― Richard Ford

“I am someone with neither past nor future, everything I do is to find my connection to this world. Where do I come from, why I am here? Can you imagine that if someone like me disappear in this world, nobody would even notice, like I have never existed, that I would leave no trace behind. Sometimes when I look into the mirror, I always doubt if I do exist, or what I see is just an illusion.”
― Lei Xu, Daomu Biji Vol. 11, 10 Years Later

“I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
― David Foster Wallace

“You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddamn sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddamn phenomenal world. {...} I used to worry about that. I don’t worry about it very much any more. At least I’m still in love with Yorick’s skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick’s skull. I want an honorable goddamn skull when I’m dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddamn skull like Yorick’s.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.”
― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (European Perspectives: a Series in Social Thought & Cultural Ctiticism)

“It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

“He said he was - this is exactly what he said - he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading 'Dombey and Son', and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you - that's exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he's perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff! I could just spit! I could! It's like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something…”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can't do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness....and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“My mother practiced hours every day, hours as painful to hear as to play. At first everybody thought she would give in. Day followed day, and the terrible stumbling sounds went on for hours on end.

She did not know what else to do.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Fortunately, her year of graduate classes prepared her for obnoxious conduct.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Gardens in the Dunes

“Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.”
― Robert Creeley