theia > theia's Quotes

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Right," I said, but it didn't feel very right. I didn't want
to make it. I wanted to lie down with it and strangle it and kill it and save it and nurse it and kill it again and I wanted to go and forget where I was going and I wanted to change my name and forget my face and I wanted to drink and get my head ruined but I certainly hadn't thought about making it. That wasn't anything I'd ever sought out to do.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, McGlue

“Suspicion invites danger, doesn't it? Keep the imagination soft and happy, and only good things will come.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“I closed my eyes. I could go anywhere with my eyes closed to the moon if I wanted, listen to the deafening echo of silence as it spun through space. That is the sound of silence, isn't it? The sound of death? The sound of nonexistence? The friction of not being? Everyone on Earth had heard of death, from time to time. How many have fallen there! Others had lived and died before me.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Whenever I felt happy or sad, there he came, putting thoughts in my head, asking me to
explain myself. I never should have married an academic. They always need to analyze and prove a point about something. Well, prove a point now, Walter, I said to the mind-space. Prove a point with Magda. If you're so smart.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“And then I thought of my loneliness, my approaching death, how nobody knew me, how nobody cared. I thought of my parents, long dead, and how little love they'd given me. I thought of Walter, of his nauseatingly gentle caresses. Even when he meant to be tender, he was condescending and controlling. I'd never been loved properly. Nobody had ever said, "You are wonderful, even your bitterness and neurotic energy are wonderful. Even your suspiciousness, your rigidity, your graying, thinning, hair, your wrinkled thighs?" I'd been young and beautiful once, and even then nobody had kissed me and said, "How young and beautiful you are”, not unless they wanted something from me. And that was Walter. Always wanting something, some permission to be boastful, some permission to have power. I cried and cried, thinking of the love I could have had, had I never met that awful, deleterious, pompous man. I let tears drip from my eyes, my head bent toward the gravel, and as they splatted they made a little trail behind me. Maybe Charlie would pass by later and follow the trail. Poor Charlie. He was the only one on Earth who loved me, and even he had left. My head began to throb. I got dizzy again.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Eventually I gave up making cards. There was such childish hope in these cards, I began to feel pitiful even to myself like a dog whose tail is thump-thump-thumping long after everyone has abandoned him.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat

“Like a memory of having been poisoned by something you’d eaten, barely managed to survive—and yet here is the food again, and you are hungry.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat

“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day. You see the approach, you contemplate the beauty of the cloud, you observe it passing, you let it go. You do not dwell upon what you have seen, you do not regret it, you are content to understand that the identical cloud will never come again—no matter how beautiful, unique, you do not weep at its loss.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat

“Well here I am on the floor he thought, is life really so much worse here on the floor than it would be on the bed or even in a totally different location. No, life is exactly the same, life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head. I might as well be lying here: breathing the vile dust of the carpet into my lungs gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body because it’s essentially the same as every other experience.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Peter would think her sentimental, so she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying; what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say, simply what they felt.”
“But I do not know, what I feel” said Peter.”
― Virgina Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

“A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I alwas identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Don't dream Rachel; talk" said Helen.
As if a spring had been touched, Rachel burst forth.”
― Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia

“He came to a tree which spread its shade and murmured over the dry river bed. He leant against it, so that his hat fell back, and his forehead was pressed to the bark. "I love her." He murmured aloud, in a voice that was half a sob, "I love her, I love her I love her" and then sobbed, so that he could stand no longer, but sat in the shade of the tree still, except for the movement which his sobs made, irregularly. When he unclasped his knees, and raised his face, an enormous happiness was to be seen there. He saw nothing, not the leaves, or the great blue dragonfly, or the lizard slipping between the stones in the sun; he saw nothing but the tender and magnificent world; he felt nothing but the sublime relief of allowing himself to love.”
― Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia

“Dick, you're better than I am"
said Clarissa.
"You see all around, where I only see there" she pressed a point on the back of his hand
"That's my business, as I tried to explain at dinner."
"What I like about you, Dick, is that you're always the
same, and I'm a creature of moods."
"You're a pretty creature anyhow" he said, gazing at her with deeper eyes.
"You think so, do you? Then kiss me.”
― Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. ”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“To die, - To sleep, - To sleep!
Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Will you tell me, what is a mortal like?” It was a child’s question, but he nodded gravely. “There is no single answer. They are each different. The only thing they share is death. You know the word?” “I know it,” I said. “But I do not understand.” “No god can. Their bodies crumble and pass into earth. Their souls turn to cold smoke and fly to the underworld. There they eat nothing and drink nothing and feel no warmth. Everything they reach for slips from their grasp.” A chill shivered across my skin. “How do they bear it?” “As best they can.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet