Anca > Anca's Quotes

“We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

“He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. . . . Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar
situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I
must first of all say: T am a woman”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A History of Sex

“The terms masculine and feminine are
used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal
papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite
like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the
positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of
man to designate human beings in general ; whereas woman
represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without
reciprocity.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A History of Sex

“Your earliest thoughts, remnants of how you lived inside yourself as a small boy, You can remember only some of it, isolated bits and pieces, brief flashes of recognition that surge up in you unexpectedly at random moments - brought on by the smell of something, or the touch of something, or the way the light falls on something in the here and now of adulthood.
At least you think you can remember, you believe you remember, but perhaps you are not remembering at all, or remembering only a later remembrance of what you think you thought in that distant time which is all but lost to you now.”
― Paul Auster , Report from the Interior

“Stars, on the other hand, were inexplicable. Not holes in the sky, not candles, not electric lights, not anything that resembled what you knew. The immensity of the black air overhead, the vastness of the space that stood between you and those small luminosities, was something that resisted all understanding. Benign and beautiful presences hovering in the night, there because they were there and for no other reason. The work of God's hands, yes, but what in the world had he been thinking?”
― Paul Auster, Report from the Interior

“Until you were five or six, perhaps even seven, you thought the words human being were pronounced human bean. You found it mystifying that humanity should be represented by such a small, common vegetable, but somehow, twisting around your thoughts to accommodate this misunderstanding, you decided that the very smallness of the bean was what made it significant, that we all start out in our mother's womb no larger than a bean, and therefore the bean was the truest, most powerful symbol of life itself.”
― Paul Auster, Report from the Interior

“In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn't have been possible for him to remember where he had begun.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan