Lauren > Lauren's Quotes

“Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est." (Roughly, "They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.")”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
― Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”
― Albert Camus

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.”
― William Faulkner

“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

“Many others will win a prize. But the palm will be won by the fortunate man for whom it is reserved to trace the formative forces of the animal body back to the general forces that direct the life of the universe.”
― Karl Enrst von Baer

“Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.”
― Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Door Frame

“I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
― Tennyson, Alfred Lord

“As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.”
― John Donne

“…truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
― David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

“The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957

“The “what ifs” and “should haves” will eat your brain.”
― John O Callaghan

“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…”
― David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

“I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.”
― Susan Sontag

“How to live as divided cells — voilà! Something always eludes the scientists, the poets, the stargazers, the biologists, the anthropologists. Something eludes the informers, detectives, police, lawyers. It is the dream. And what lies in the deformed mirrors of the dream and haunts our sleep is the secret of everything.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.”
― Ray Bradbury

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.

Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980