Adrianne > Adrianne's Quotes

“Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine non sum dignus should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“My little Matthew, Isabelle at once snapped back at him, when two people agree, it means one of them is redundant”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“Life is a continuous cycle of once-terrifying things becoming normal.”
― Young-ha Kim, Your Republic Is Calling You

“I used to think I could change the world, but now I realise that I can't even control my urge to eat something sweet.”
― Young-Ha Kim, Your Republic Is Calling You

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!”
― Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned

“A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“You takes things too seriously. It seems you’re not satisfied unless you always make yourself the protagonist in some tragedy.”
― Osamu Dazai, A New Hamlet

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

“Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains", said Edmund, "That's because we've got something in them", replied Lucy.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I didn't know whether it was better to maintain a fierce distinction between yourself and your acquaintances in society in order to deal with and respond properly to things in a pleasant manner, or rather never to hide yourself, to remain true to yourself always, even if they say bad things about you”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

[Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]”
― Robert Hughes

“... the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“If a man were to know the end of this day's business ere it come; But it suffice us that the day will end, and then the end be known. If we meet again, well then we'll smile, and if not then this parting was well made.”
― Julius Caesar

“The birds do not sing, clouds remain of rubber, glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design.”
― John Hawkes, Travesty

“One and all they are driven by the twin engines of ignorance and willful barbarism. You nod, you also are familiar with these two powerful components of our national character, ignorance and willful barbarianism. Yes, everywhere you turn, and even among the most gifted of us, the most extensively educated, these two brute forces of motivation will eventually emerge. The essential information is always missing; sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern. We are all secret encouragers of ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians.”
― John Hawkes, Travesty