Maggie > Maggie's Quotes

“One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..”
― bell hooks, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem

“Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most.”
― F. B. Jevons, A History Of Greek Literature: From The Earliest Period To The Death Of Demosthenes

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“O, let me kiss that hand!

KING LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
― Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“...sitting with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn't talk except when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer in the afternoon, or he might never.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“Listen, lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.”
― Marguerite Duras, Practicalities

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
― Anton Chekhov

“I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.”
― Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“What do you do from morning to night?"

"I endure myself.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”
― Martin Buber

“His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Language transcends us and yet we speak.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Time wounds all heels.”
― Groucho Marx

“Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“To understand the limitation of things, desire them.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Mold started to grow in my ears because no one ever spoke to me”
― Yōko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear

“I hope you don’t mind tea in mugs,’ she said, coming in with a tray. ‘I told you I was a slut.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”
― Simone Weil

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”
― Kafka, Franz

“The more ideas they had the more they suffered.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas