Jacy > Jacy's Quotes

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
― Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass / My Bondage and My Freedom / Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

“But now, Mr. Bates didn't scream or try to get the truck's license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips - they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world that they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The mind I love must have wild places.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.”
― Edward Albee

“I write to find out what I'm talking about.”
― Edward Albee

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
― Tennessee Williams, Conversations With Tennessee Williams

“Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.”
― Tennessee Williams , The Glass Menagerie

“I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.”
― Edward Albee

“For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . .”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“In plain words, you’ve got to make up your mind to study whatever you undertake, and concentrate your mind on it, and really work at it. This isn’t wisdom. Any damned fool in the world knows it’s true, whether it’s a question of raising horses or writing plays. You simply have to face the prospect of starting at the bottom and spending years learning how to do it.”
― Eugene O'Neill

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“This is not a letter but my arms about you for a brief moment.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Chris liked to scan a page, and then quickly leap to another. I liked to dawdle over the beautiful lines, going back to read through them twice, sometimes three times. We argued incessantly about this. "Read faster, Cathy! You try to absorb the words.”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic