Tami > Tami's Quotes

“You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“She was not one for emptying her face of expression. ”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself.
- But your yourself sucks!
- It is, lamentably, all I have.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:

When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language.

And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books.

So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.”
― Junot Diaz

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Even the most primite societies have an innate resepect for the insane.”
― S.E. Hinton, Rumble Fish

“Your mother is not crazy. Neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made the perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do.”
― S.E. Hinton, Rumble Fish

“California is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.”
― S.E. Hinton, Rumble Fish

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”
― Erich fromm, The Art of Being

“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”
― Erich Fromm

“Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other's wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.”
― Kobo Abe

“When I look at small things, I think I shall go on living: drops of rain, leather gloves shrunk by being wet...When I look at something too big, I want to die: the Diet Building, or a map of the world...”
― Kobo Abe, The Box Man

“Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.”
― Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“...what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment it is nothing.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“I don’t like to be in delineated moments. I don’t like it when your reality feels prescriptive. I don’t like Christmas holidays and their pseudo-joy. I don’t like New Year’s Eve. I don’t like anything that feels like an established electromagnetic paradigm is pulling you into it’s cliched forebear’s footsteps.”
― Russell Brand

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

- Bad Blood”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell