Denialandavoidance > Denialandavoidance's Quotes

“The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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

“There are other people on the Internet. It's awesome. You get all the benefits of 'other people' without the body odor and the eye contact.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.”
― Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel

“He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax...”
― Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England

“No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

“You give away nice like it doesn't cost you anything.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“How can I teach her
some way of being human
that won't destroy her

I would like to tell her, Love
is enough, I would like to say,
Find shelter in another skin.

I would like to say, Dance
and be happy. Instead I will say
in my crone’s voice, Be
ruthless when you have to, tell
the truth when you can,
when you can see it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“Do not believe that others will die, not you.... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”
― carson mccullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Monsters don't die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity's infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.”
― Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

“Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.”
― Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

“No," Cath said, "Seriously. Look at you. You’ve got your shit together, you’re not scared of anything. I’m scared of everything. And I’m crazy. Like maybe you think I’m a little crazy, but I only ever let people see the tip of my crazy iceberg. Underneath this veneer of slightly crazy and socially inept, I’m a complete disaster.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.”
― Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

“I’ve been accused of having a death wish but I think it’s life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.”
― Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

“Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison, and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of.”
― Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

“He saw Kathleen sitting in the middle of a long white table alone.Immediately things changed. As he walked toward her the people shrank back against the walls till they were only murals; the white table lengthened and became an altar where the priestess sat alone. Vitality welled up in him and he could have stood a long time across the table from her, looking and smiling.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma we put ourselves in.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon