Vikki > Vikki's Quotes

“The whole point is that time passes. That things fade. He is already hard to remember. Look, I used to cry because I thought I'd forget. Then I knew that was ridiculous and cried because I remembered. But the truth is that one is the same as the other. Remembering and forgetting are the same bloody thing. He is not alive any more. That's all there is to know. There is no purpose to any of it. The point is there is no point.”
― Janice Galloway, The Trick is to Keep Breathing

“A suicide attempt can be very much like falling in love. You're not really sure, as you proceed, what is real and what you're making up as you go. You're genuinely uncertain how the whole thing's going to turn out. You want it, but you don't. It seems both inevitable and impossible.”
― Clancy Martin, Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love

“Nobody notices, only you've known,

you're not sick, not crazy,
not angry, not sad--

It's just this, you're injured.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmanoeuvred years, had you in a chokehold, every part roughed up, the eyes dripping.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe and to breathe you have to create a truce—

a truce with the patience of a stethoscope.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“A woman carries her inner life - lugs it around or holds it in fumes that both poison and bless her - while nourishing another's inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, "That meaning of life is that it ends." Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love and create.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

“From sunrise to sunset, from one day to the next, till our black hair turns white, we eat, we sleep, we bear children and we watch them grow. We watch them get married and in turn bear children of their own. How time flies, we say to ourselves. Then one day, we look down at our feet and we're surprised. Roots have sprouted in the ground of our daily living.”
― Suchen Christine Lim, A Bit of Earth

“For what is life but a succession of change; of one thing after another; painful beginnings, fearful setting out into the unknown, leaving what we are for what we have not yet become.”
― Suchen Christine Lim, A bit of earth

“Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“The real value of a sexually attractive woman in a world which regards good looks as a commodity depends on the degree to which she puts her looks to work for her.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“She is obscene to the extent to which she is beautiful. Her beauty, her submissiveness and the false expectations that these qualities will do her some good are what make her obscene.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Do we become so lost in the patterns and the rhythms in our everyday lives that we fool ourselves into believing they might somehow last forever?”
― Sonny Liew, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye

“Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation - those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, "He should have stayed in school," and then wash its hands of him.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have the time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Selfishness is uncomfortable even for the selfish. Hence the rise of gated communities: the privileged don't like to be reminded of their privileges - if these carry morally dubious connotations.”
― Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

“The more varigated and complicated a society, the greater the chance that those at the top will be ignorant of the realities at the bottom.
Efficiency should not be adduced to justify gross inequality.”
― Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

“One should be cautious when drawing conclusions about people's characters from social media. On Facebook, nobody's children cry, nobody's marriage is imperilled, and everyone has beautiful days under the bluest of skies. These are performance platforms where we present versions of ourselves that are curated for public consumption.”
― Gary Younge, Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives

“We humans scorn what is not concrete. We are more easily swayed by a crying baby than by thousands of people dying elsewhere that do not make it into our dining room. The one case is a tragedy, the other a statistic.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“There is no certainty or predictability. There is no fate. There is a choice.
My choice and yours, in each moment that demands it.”
― Maria Alyokhina, Riot Days

“Power built on totalitarian principles cannot admit its mistakes. To admit a mistake is to show weakness, to back down. To lose.

This power sees conspiracy everywhere behind its back, so it lives with its head turned backwards, checking that no one is following it, that no one is dreaming up a revolution. This power must always be on its guard, it claims supreme power, is invincible to itself, the absolute made flesh.”
― Maria Alyokhina, Riot Days

“Humanity is at a crossroads. We can continue down the current path of greed, consumerism, oligarchy, poverty, war, racism, and environmental degradation. Or we can lead the world in moving in a very different direction.”
― Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In

“One of the more profound lessons that I've learnt in politics is that everything is related to everything else. Nothing exists in a vacuum.”
― Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In

“The one who wishes to possess is inevitably controlled by the object of desire. He fears losing you. But a person isn't an object. You can only love a person, not own her.”
― Yeng Pway Ngon, Unrest

“Dear reader, you've never been a character in a novel, especially not a female character created by a man. You don't understand how depressing an experience that can be.”
― Yeng Pway Ngon

“I stored up my old grudges like family heirlooms. Was this too petty? Let me tell you, hatred and resentment are built up like this, fragment by fragment. As soon as a crack appears, it all comes surging out and sweeps you up in the flood.”
― Yeng Pway Ngon, Unrest

“He was never more than an armchair philosopher, unwilling to deal with the real world. He was happy to live in a capitalist society replete with material wealth, experiencing its decadence and wickedness whilst expounding on the glories of communism, but he would never dream of putting himself through the deprivation of living in an actual communist country.”
― Yeng Pway Ngon, Unrest

“You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one. You want more: more love, more sex, more attention, more fun. You want someone to look at you with lust - after years of laundry - transforming you into something radiant. You want it, you need it, you owe it yourself to get it. To live any other way is to be muffled and gray and marching meaninglessly toward death. You want what she gave you at the start (but what you had hoped would expand and intensify instead of shrinking until you find yourself so sad, so resentful, you can barely stand to be you).

You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply