Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
― Epictetus

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Lucifer protests he was never to blame for inducing anyone to sin, and that he’s never had an interest in owning souls: 'They die, and they come here – having transgressed against what they believed to be right – and expect us to fulfill their desire for pain and retribution. I don’t make them come here… I need no souls. And how can anyone own a soul? No, they belong to themselves. They just hate to have to face up to it.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists

“Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.

It has been a beautiful
fight.

Still
is.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.”
― Ernest Hemingway