Emily Laurent-Monaghan > Emily's Quotes

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

“If women were the equals of men, men would no longer equal themselves. Why then should women resemble what men would have ceased to be?”
― Christine Delphy

“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
― Emmanuel Kant

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Metaphysical guilt is the lack of absolute solidarity with the human being as such--an indelible claim beyond morally meaningful duty. This solidarity is violated by my presence at a wrong or a crime. It is not enough that I cautiously risk my life to prevent it; if it happens, and I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive.”
― Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt

“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it”
― Nella Larsen

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard, The Living

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable. ”
― Adam Smith

“In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it's a long, long line. She's one of them. I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie ...”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.”
― Athol Fugard, Tsotsi

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
― HEGEL

“People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“If the error is thrust deeply enough into the soul, man cannot but succumb to it.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
― Simone Weil

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

“True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to us now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority--seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Politeness is organized indifference.”
― Paul Valéry