Maya > Maya's Quotes

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― James Baldwin

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”
― James Baldwin

“To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
― James Baldwin

“It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”
― James Baldwin, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon

“Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.”
― Dorothy Allison

“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
...Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. ”
― E.B. White, Here Is New York

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Though she be but little, she is fierce!”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
― James Baldwin

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“The cruelest prison of all is the prison of the mind.”
― Piri Thomas

“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Résumé
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”
― Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker

“By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing.
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying.
Lady make note of this --
One of you is lying.”
― Dorothy Parker

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”
― Dorothy Parker, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

“Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”
― Dorothy Parker

“And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned.”
― Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun: Poems

“There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”
― Dorothy Parker, Collected Stories

“Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.”
― Jane Austen