Wanderer > Wanderer's Quotes

“The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear"- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.”
― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”
― Germaine Greer

“Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.”
― Germaine Greer

“Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Surviving
Is the only war
We can afford”
― Margaret Atwood

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
― Anais Nin

“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I wanted to watch her walking, unselfconscious, for as long as possible.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann