Lu M > Lu's Quotes

“I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy...”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.”
― Rachel Simmons, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls

“I was always watching you." This could have been a breathless declaration of love or a final farewell.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

“You don’t just go to somebody and say, ‘I’m a better person because you’re in my head.”
― Neal Shusterman, Unwind

“The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.”
― Courtney Love, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love

“What do I mean by this? The fear of being called "all that" and the demonization of girls who appear assertive or self-satisfied force underground the very behaviors girls need to become successful. Confidence and competition are critical tools for success, yet they break the rules of femininity. Openly competitive behavior undermines the "good girl" personality.”
― Rachel Simmons, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
― Sylvia Plath

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It was terrifying to realize life goes on without you.”
― Courtney Love

“What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different.”
― V.C. Andrews, My Sweet Audrina

“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions...”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera

“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Love doesn't always come when you want it to. Sometimes it just happens, despite your will.”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“We're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can...”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof