Sayani > Sayani's Quotes

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
― Robert Bloch

“Funny how we take it for granted that we know all there is to know about another person, just because we see them frequently or because of some strong emotional tie.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“She was the only one left, and she was real.
To be the only one, and to know that you are real - that's sanity, isn't it?
But just to be on the safe side, maybe it was best to keep pretending that one was a stuffed figure. Not to move. Never to move. Just to sit here in the tiny room, forever and ever.
If she sat there without moving, they wouldn't punish her.
If she sat there without moving, they'd know that she was sane, sane, sane.
She sat there for quite a long time, and then a fly came buzzing through the bars.
It lighted on her hand.
If she wanted to, she could reach out and swat the fly.
But she didn't swat it.
She didn't swat it, and she hoped they were watching, because that proved what sort of a person she really was.
Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly...”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Magic--that's just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn't so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.”
― Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

“If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.”
― Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

“Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.”
― Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

“Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.”
― Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Thoughts are divine.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.”
― Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths and Other Plays

“When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.”
― Maxim Gorky

“Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don't you see that the opposite could also be true? That it is possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That it's possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they're...done? In a sort of Little, by which I mean personal, Un-Bang?”
― Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life

“Light the candle of love. Spread the rays of happiness in every direction in every breath.”
― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion