Dane > Dane's Quotes

“We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”
― Judith Butler

“An emotional debt is hard to square.”
― Iceberg Slim, Pimp: The Story of My Life

“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

“If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.”
― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Gospel of Thomas

“But man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. ”
― Guy Debord

“Then Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien Gandalf the White, The Two Towers

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”
― Anaïs Nin

“My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.”
― Philip Larkin

“Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.”
― Philip Larkin

“I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, and therefore abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“I am stuffing your mouth with your
promises and watching
you vomit them out upon my face.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.”
― Anne Sexton

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
― T.S. Eliot.

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”
― Terence McKenna

“Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?”
― Terence McKenna

“It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.”
― Terence McKenna