Vaughn > Vaughn's Quotes

“It was strange, I reflected.. that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“As an adult I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable itself - we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it's much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it's spring instead of autumn; we're alone instead of with three friends. Or worse, with three friends instead of alone.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“You might as well make yourself fly as to make yourself love.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“Most men judge your importance in their lives by how much you can hurt them, not by how happy you can make them.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you're feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone, and see what happens.”
― Dossie Easton, The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities

“the most successful long-term relationships are the ones with enough flexibility to redefine themselves over and over again through the years.”
― Dossie Easton, The Ethical Slut : A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures

“The problem is that when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself from finding solutions. If this is someone else’s fault, only that person can fix it, right? So poor you can’t do anything but sit there and moan. On”
― Dossie Easton, The Ethical Slut : A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures

“A final note about love: One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you’re feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone, and see what happens.”
― Dossie Easton, The Ethical Slut : A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn’t be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library’s peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light…”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.

You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?

Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.

If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“Small children are great accepters. They don’t understand shame, or the need to hide things.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”
― Daphne duMaurier, Rebecca

“I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is
alone.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca