maja > maja's Quotes

“Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Destroy superabundance. Starve the flesh, shave the hair, clarify the mind, define the will, restrain the senses, leave the family, flee the church, kill the vermin,vomit the heart, forget the dead. Limit time, forgo amusement, deny nature, reject acquaintances, discard objects, forget truths, dissect myth, stop motion, block impulse, choke sobs, swallow chatter. Scorn joy, scorn touch, scorn tragedy, scorn liberty, scorn constancy, scorn hope, scorn exaltation, scorn reproduction, scorn variety, scorn embellishment, scorn release, scorn rest, scorn sweetness, scorn light. It's a question of form as much as function. It is a matter of revulsion.”
― Jenny Holzer

“In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”
― Jenny Holzer

“THERE IS A PERIOD WHEN IT IS CLEAR
THAT YOU HAVE GONE WRONG
BUT YOU CONTINUE.
SOMETIMES THERE IS A
LUXURIOUS AMOUNT OF TIME
BEFORE ANYTHING BAD HAPPENS.”
― Jenny Holzer

“YOU SHOULD LIMIT THE NUMBER OF TIMES
YOU ACT AGAINST YOUR NATURE,
LIKE SLEEPING WITH PEOPLE YOU HATE.
IT¹S INTERESTING TO TEST YOUR CAPABILITIES FOR A WHILE
BUT TOO MUCH WILL CAUSE DAMAGE.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Go where people sleep and see if they are safe”
― Jenny Holzer

“Enjoy yourself because you can't change anything anyway.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
― Richard Siken

“Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.

I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”
― Richard Siken

“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“After this, I sat on the floor of the kitchen and thought about Leah, about the shape of her feet and the way she spoke about her father, the special voice she used to talk to cats, her kind frown, her intonation, her fingernails. ... I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved. ... Are you just now realising that people die, Leah had said to me when I voiced this thought, tucked up beside her on the sofa with my knees pressed tight into the backs of hers. Not people, I had said, just you.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Czeslaw Milosz