drea > drea's Quotes

“To say human life had no meaning was the easy part. But Hanio was struck all over again by the huge amount of energy required to live a life filled with so much meaninglessness.”
― Yukio Mishima, Life for Sale

“Nobody knows you.
You don't know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own imaginings?”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

“Remind me to to make you smile like that again, when you aren't dying, and I have all the time in the world to memorise it.”
― Lauren Roberts, Powerless

“Living life as an artist is a practice.
You are either engaging in the practice
or you’re not.

It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it.
It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.”
You are either living as a monk or you’re not.

We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output.

The real work of the artist
is a way of being in the world.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
― Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space

“Unhealthy love is two people stoking a shared fantasy of desperate beauty, weaponizing passion and desire.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces (139).”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“Life is an ad hoc affair. It has to be improvised all the time because of the hard fact that everything we do changes what is. This is distressing to people who would like to see things beautifully planned out and settled once and for all. That cannot be.”
― Jane Jacobs, Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs

“The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their distances from men.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean & Impressive

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“It's hard not to feel humorless, as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you're not imagining things. It's hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you're going to float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening; it's that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist