Vesper's quotes

(showing 1-35 of 35)

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. "
— Virginia Woolf

tags: gender
13 people liked it

"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. "
— Virginia Woolf

tags: women
79 people liked it

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: confidence
110 people liked it

"But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

7 people liked it

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

49 people liked it

""t's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.""
— Stephen Chbosky

78 people liked it

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

tags: advertising, apple, change, commercial, computers, different, madness, misfits, nonconformity, progressive, quo, rebels, status, think, troublemakers
7,194 people liked it

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

tags: freethinker, inspirational, mad
1,129 people liked it

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: good, writing
1,948 people liked it

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

tags: criticism, humor, writing
367 people liked it

"My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see."
— Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim)

tags: inspirational, tattoo, writing
96 people liked it

"A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."
— Randall Jarell

tags: poetry, writing
45 people liked it

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

tags: writing
62 people liked it

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

tags: art, craft, fiction, reading, writing
92 people liked it

"Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. [published in 1979]"
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

tags: kundera, prophetic, wisdom, writing
18 people liked it

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

tags: writing
591 people liked it

"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

tags: writing
83 people liked it

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

tags: activism, apathy, hate, indifference, love, opposite, philosophy
7,309 people liked it

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
— Elie Wiesel

tags: activism, ethics, justice, philosophy
978 people liked it

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: inspirational, music, philosophy
5,817 people liked it

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
— E.M. Forster

tags: advice, e-m-, essay, fiction, forster, writing
53 people liked it

"Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

tags: first-sentence
2 people liked it

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

tags: life
645 people liked it

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

tags: life, love
271 people liked it

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

tags: books, humor
9,564 people liked it

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
7,798 people liked it

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

tags: inspirational, stories, writing
2,768 people liked it

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

tags: inspirational, love
2,561 people liked it

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

tags: sympathy
1,763 people liked it

"To love would be an awfully big adventure."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

tags: adventure, love
1,739 people liked it

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

tags: books, library
3,241 people liked it

"The night you gave me my birthday party... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best."
— Zelda Fitzgerald

6 people liked it

"A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar."
— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

tags: books, humor
549 people liked it

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