Honor Levy > Honor's Quotes

“Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.”
― Ayn Rand

“I’ll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“None can reply - all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, which teaches awful doubt.”
― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

“I do know the worst sin--perhaps the only sin--passion can commit, is to be joyless.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.”
― Courtney Love, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
― Joseph Stalin

“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather'd raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!
O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell;
When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.”
― Simone Weil

“After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleamings of an empty heart.

The storms of ruthless dispensation
Have struck my flowery garland numb,
I live in lonely desolation
And wonder when my end will come.

Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted
By tardy winter's whistling chill,
A single leaf which has outlasted
Its season will be trembling still.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama — a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“If my Valentine you won't be,
I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.”
― Ernest Hemingway, 88 Poems

“in this land some of us fuck more than
we die but most of us die
better than we fuck”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Sweets to the sweet, farewell! I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, And not have strewed thy grave.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.
- Through the Gates of the Silver Key”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

“So wise so young, they say, do never live long.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III

“Suicide, is a persons privilege. I don't believe it's a sin or a crime it's your right if you do. Though it doesn't get you anywhere.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves