Constance Plumley > Constance's Quotes

“She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.”
― Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair

“Display in a foreign culture is not a foreign concept, and anyone who has ever traveled abroad will recollect, if they are honest, their status as an ephemeral concubine, with a global passport to seduction and a license to transgress. All the fleeting love affairs that are as much a part of visits to far-off lands as baggage tags and travel-size shampoo bottles--- isn't this proof enough that we all fall into the delightful trap of exoticising and commodifying ourselves in foreign places? ”
― Cynthia Gralla, The Floating World

“Food was becoming more abstract, more aestheticized and compartmentalized-- and indeed, after kaiseki, who can ever go back to Burger King, or even a well-made gourmet sandwich? Instead of food, I longed for other things to swell my body and buoy its lines--- lists of ancient queens, the grave and stately names for the forgotten regions of the sea, the imagined words for desire in hermetic languages; food, on the other hand, was leaving me increasingly unmoved.... I grew thinner and thinner, streamlined, my blood nourished by ever-slighter molecules, some kind of pale elongated light running the length of my body, nightmares detouring it in the most starved, and so-lightly blue-black-bruised, corners of my flesh. In this state of non-health, every step became a performance, each stride an act of contrition, a question and an answer.... On the once-dry, now-flowering branches of my skeletal limbs, the words sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch were being invisibly but indelibly written. I was a festival of new senses.
”
― Cynthia Gralla

“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,' said Alice, 'Because I'm not myself you see.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“It was a dream, not a nightmare, a beautiful dream I could never imagine in a thousand nods. There was a girl next to me who wasn't beautiful until she smiled and I felt that smile come at me in heat waves following, soaking through my body and out my finger tips in shafts of color and I knew somewhere in the world, somewhere, that there was love for me.”
― Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

“Little kids shoot marbles
where the branches break the sun

into graceful shafts of light…
I just want to be pure.”
― Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

“That, I realized, is the great beauty of dreams: the devil may inevitably find a way to jerk you off, but you can always wake up before he makes you cum.”
― Jim Carroll, Forced Entries- The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973

“You see, you just don't know
I'm here to give you my heart
And you want some fashion show”
― Jim Carroll

“Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.”
― Jim Carroll, Forced Entries- The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973

“I love this mansion, though it is too many windows
...to open halfway each morning
...to close halfway each night.”
― Jim Carroll

“Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.”
― Lena Dunham

“I just don't want to be around people who don't hate everything in their life right now.”
― Lena Dunham

“It's not brave to do something that doesn't scare you.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“Throughout the day I often ask myself, Could I fall asleep right now? and the answer is always a resounding yes.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“I think if you feel like you were born to write, then you probably were.”
― Lena Dunham

“Enjoy going through life as yourself.”
― Lena Dunham

“It's not so much that I like him as a person God, but as a boy he's very handsome.”
― Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. I just told my mother I want a bra. Please help me grow God. You know where.”
― Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

“Why do they wait until sixth grade when you already know everything?”
― Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

“I like one hair, tuna fish, the smell of rain and things that are pink. I hate pimples, baked potatoes, when my mother's mad, and religious holidays.”
― Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

“She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
― J.D. Salinger

“grief makes one hour ten.”
― William Shakespeare, King Richard II

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems

“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
― Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you're willing to practice, you can do.”
― Bob Ross