Victoria > Victoria's Quotes

“The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.”
― Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs

“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”
― Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game

“Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma - that repetition - maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.”
― Janet Fitch, Paint it Black

“Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“I don't know how to talk.
Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“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

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
― Virginia Woolf

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
― T.S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot Reading: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Others

“Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”
― T.S. Eliot

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”
― T.S. Eliot.

“Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Humor is also a way of saying something serious.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
― T.S. Eliot

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.”
― T.S. Eliot

“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl

“Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander