Suzanne > Suzanne's Quotes

“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.”
― Robert Fripp

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
― Woody Allen

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.”
― Anne Sexton

“I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is one of a kind
just as yours is.”
― Anne Sexton

“She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

“And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged…”
― Raymond Carver, Short Cuts: Selected Stories

“I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.”
― Raymond Carver, Elephant and Other Stories

“…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.”
― William Faulkner

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.”
― James Joyce

“And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Every bond is a bond to sorrow.”
― James Joyce

“He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. ”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Sorrow floats.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All