Kinsey > Kinsey's Quotes

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“There was always that shadowy twin, thin when i was fat, fat when i was thin, myself in silvery narrative...”
― Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle

“But Arthur couldn’t understand why I would have nightmares. Surely nothing that terrible had ever happened to me, I was a normal girl with all kinds of advantages, I was beautiful and intelligent, why didn’t I make something of myself? I should try to be more of a leader, he would tell me. What he failed to understand was that there were really only two kinds of people: fat ones and thin ones. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t see what Arthur saw. The outline of my former body still surrounded me, like a mist, like a phantom moon, like the image of Dumbo the Flying Elephant superimposed on my own. I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”
― Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“And speaking of evolution, can we imagine the origin and stepping stones and rejected mutations of Time? Has there ever been a “primitive” form of Time in which, say, the Past was not yet clearly differentiated from the Present, so that past shadows and shapes showed through the still soft, long, larval “now”?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“It's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an obsession.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah