Holly > Holly's Quotes

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
― Joan Didion

“I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. I don’t think it’s such a big thing anymore, but the idea that you sacrifice everything for your children—it’s a load of rubbish. It leads to very destructive living and thinking, and it has a much worse effect on children than if you go out and live your own life. You’re meant to adore your children at all times, and you’re not meant to have a bad thought about them. That’s facism, you know, and it’s elevating the child at the expense of the mother. It’s like your life is not valid except in fulfilling this child’s needs. What about all your needs, your desires, your wants, your problems? They’re going to come out anyway, so it’s better they’re acknowledged straight off. Having said that, I really do believe that children have to be protected. They have to be loved. Somewhere between the two, I think, something needs to be sorted out. The relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex. There’s every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would alleviate them in some way”
― Marina Carr

“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you for rejecting me by never being there, fuck you for making me feel like shit about myself, fuck you for bleeding the fucking love and life out of me, fuck my father for fucking up my life for good and fuck my mother for not leaving him, but most of all, fuck you God for making me love a person who does not exist.
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“I am an emotional plagiarist, stealing other people's pain, subsuming it into my own until I can't remember whose it is any more.”
― Sarah Kane

“There's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“They will love me for that which destroys me.”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“If you died it would be like my bones had been removed. No one would know why, but I would collapse.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“No one survives life.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“No boy is worth crying over, and the one who is won't make you cry.”
― Sarah Kane

“I am much fucking angrier than you think.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“Death is my lover and he wants to move in.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“Curiosity will conquer fear more than bravery will.”
― James Stephens

“Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera.”
― James Stephens

“After a lie truth bursts out, and it is no longer the radiant and serene goddess knew or hoped for—it is a disease, it is a moral syphilis and will ravage until the body in which it can dwell has been purged.”
― James Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin

“Needing people yet being afraid of them is wearing me out.”
― Janice Galloway, The Trick is to Keep Breathing

“There are split seconds in the morning between waking and sleep when you know nothing. Not just things missing like where or who you are, but nothing. The fact of being alive has no substance. No awareness of skin and bone, the trap inside the skull. For these split seconds you hover in the sky like Icarus. Then you remember”
― Janice Galloway

“Do what you want with life, you don't get another one. Never apologize, never explain. Stay light, stay free. Jealousy kills; it kills whatever it touches.”
― Janice Galloway, Jellyfish

“I am interested in silences”
― Anne Enright

“Because a mother's love is God's greatest joke.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad”
― Anne Enright, The Green Road

“He slept like a shout.”
― Anne Enright, The Green Road

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Résumé
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”
― Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope

“By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing.
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying.
Lady make note of this --
One of you is lying.”
― Dorothy Parker