Suzette Mandy > Suzette's Quotes

“I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generatie X: vertellingen voor een versnelde cultuur

“I saw a meme the other day with a picture of Marilyn Manson and Robin Williams. It said about the former, this isn’t the face of depression, and about the latter, this is. This really struck a chord and it’s been on my mind since then. As someone who has continuously dipped in and out of chronic depression and anxiety for close to three decades now, and I’ve never previously spoken about the subject, I finally thought it was time I did.
These days it’s trendy for people to think they’re cool and understanding about mental illness, posting memes and such to indicate so. But the reality is far different to that. It seems most people think if they publicly display such understanding then perhaps a friend will come to them, open up, and calmly discuss their problems. This will not happen. For someone in that seemingly hopeless void of depression and anxiety the last thing they are likely to do is acknowledge it, let alone talk about it. Even if broached by a friend they will probably deny there is a problem and feel even more distanced from the rest of the world.
So nobody can do anything to help, right? No. If right now you suspect one of your friends is suffering like this then you’re probably right. If right now you think that none of your friends are suffering like this then you’re probably wrong. By all means make your public affirmations of understanding, but at least take on board that an attempt to connect on this subject by someone you care about could well be cryptic and indirect.
When we hear of celebrities who suffered and finally took their own lives the message tends to be that so many close friends had no idea. This is woeful, but it’s also great, right? Because by not knowing there was a problem there is no burden of responsibility on anyone else. This is another huge misconception, that by acknowledging an indirect attempt to connect on such a complex issue that somehow you are accepting responsibility to fix it. This is not the case. You don’t have to find a solution. Maybe just listen. Many times over the years I’ve seen people recoil when they suspect that perhaps that is the direct a conversation is about to turn, and they desperately scramble for anything that can immediately change the subject. By acknowledging you’ve heard and understood doesn’t mean you are picking up their burden and carrying it for them.
Anyway, I’ve said my piece. And please don’t think this is me reaching out for help. If this was my current mindset the last thing I’d ever do is write something like this, let alone share it.”
― R.D. Ronald

“The world won't come to me...so I must go to it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“in nonsense is strength”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“as sure as death and as inescapable as taxes”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“Soul mates. They really call themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are ... They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride though life like conjoined jellyfish - expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other's spaces liquidly. Making it look easy.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.”
― J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights

“I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, "crazy." But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Óóó. É sempre bom abandonar alguém que diz que gostaria de ver você de novo, porque inevitavelmente chegaria o dia em que você ia ter que abandonar essa pessoa porque ela não quer ver você de novo.”
― Irvine Welsh, Porno

“Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.”
― Italo Calvino

“I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air”
― Ian McEwan, Saturday

“I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Stupidity is a talent for misconception.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The only way to keep something pure is to keep it to yourself.”
― Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“

Winston thought. “By making him suffer”, he said.

“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.”
― Émile Zola, The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

“Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“There are more things to admire in men then to despise.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Sus rostros eran absolutamente similares en un detalle: parecían extremadamente incompletos, como cuadros con agujeros por ojos o como un rompecabezas al que le faltase una pieza nimia. Y eso que echaba en falta, pensó Richards, era el aire de desesperación. En sus estómagos no aullaban los lobos. Sus mentes no estaban llenas de sueños viciados, de esperanzas insensatas.”
― Richard Bachman, The Running Man

“I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.”
― Douglas Coupland

“That night I wrote in my journal: "Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone -- was it van Gogh? -- said that orange is the color of insanity. _Beauty is terror._ We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Why did she have to happen? Just when I was doing so good without her.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“She'll never really let me go. She likes the game too much."
"Then stop playing it.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“...what they show tells you what they want to hide.”
― Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist's Handbook

“She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement