A.'s quotes

(showing 1-50 of 161)

"Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."
— Werner Herzog

tags: academia, film, movies, passion, scholars, scholarship
9 people liked it

"If women want rights more than they got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it."
— Sojourner Truth

tags: feminism
19 people liked it

"Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies."
— Henry Miller (Sexus)

tags: lies, truth
18 people liked it

"If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force."
— Antonin Artaud (The Theater and Its Double)

tags: magic, observation
7 people liked it

"Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research."
— Brian Eno

tags: academia
3 people liked it

"When I grow up I am going to be the gangster we are all looking for."
— Lê Thi Diem Thúy (The Gangster We Are All Looking For)

tags: aspirations
2 people liked it

"if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away"
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

tags: love
29 people liked it

"Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it."
— Tom Waits

tags: kill, kiss
19 people liked it

"Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

tags: heaven, house
3 people liked it

"That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles."
— Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten)

tags: senselessness, truth
16 people liked it

"To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear."
— Avital Ronell

tags: reality
2 people liked it

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: power, sex
540 people liked it

"If you believe everything you read, better not read."
— Japanese proverb

tags: reading
56 people liked it

"What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams."
— Werner Herzog

tags: dreams, monsters, ocean, sleep
20 people liked it

"Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted."
— Emily Dickinson (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson)

tags: art, haunted, house, nature
66 people liked it

"'Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!
- Don Juan"
— George Gordon Byron

tags: fiction, strange, truth
16 people liked it

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."
— William S. Burroughs

tags: death, murder
127 people liked it

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible."
— T. E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph)

tags: dreamers, dreaming, dreams, open-eyes, open-mind
57 people liked it

"[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion."
— Clive Barker

tags: chaos, horror, illusion, oblivion, reality, truth
38 people liked it

"To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel."
— Robert Walser

2 people liked it

"As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn’t spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly."
— Clive Barker (Mister B. Gone)

tags: fire, kiss, mouth
6 people liked it

"My arms are too short to box with God."
— Johnny Cash

tags: arms, boxing, god
41 people liked it

"Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both."
— Kathy Acker (My Mother: Demonology: A Novel)

tags: center, dream, lack, murder
2 people liked it

"In his day, liking someone like David Bowie would have been the domain of degenerate officers in black and white movies about nazis."
— Jonathan Goldstein

2 people liked it

"I stood in the middle of the room flipping and Pusher was plucking at the guitar, just one string, and I went up to him and said, 'Man don't pluck those dirty notes at ME,' and like he just got up without a word and left. [Mardou]"
— Jack Kerouac (The Subterraneans)

tags: dirty-notes-mardou-flipping
2 people liked it

"If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me."
— T. E. Lawrence (Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, 1927)

tags: arabic, dahoum, language
1 person liked it

"His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]"
— Heather O'Neill

tags: aristocrats, childhood, jd-salinger
2 people liked it

"Don't be bitter. Remember Lot's wife when they kill me, and they surely will. You have to use all of your energy to do what it is you have to do. [To his wife Betty Shabazz]"
— Malcolm X

12 people liked it

"So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise."
— Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)

46 people liked it

"You save yourself or you remain unsaved."
— Alice Sebold

124 people liked it

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."
— Mike Tyson

tags: boxing, planning
8 people liked it

"Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

tags: bar, god, lies
1 person liked it

"It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

tags: blue-sky
1 person liked it

"She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

tags: desert, heart, mother
10 people liked it

"How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

tags: low
5 people liked it

"If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter."
— Anchee Min (Red Azalea)

tags: fighting, mother, womb
3 people liked it

"I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."
— Herman Melville

15 people liked it

"My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one."
— Natalie Clifford Barney

tags: queer, vice
5 people liked it

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
— Arthur C. Clarke

tags: intelligence, survival
23 people liked it

"I wake up and I see the face of the devil and I ask him, "What time is it?"

And he says,
"How much time do you want?""
— Diamanda Galás (The Shit of God: The Texts of Diamanda Galás)

tags: devil, time
2 people liked it

"So furiously each other did assayle,
As if their soules they would attonce haue rent
Out of their brests, that streames of bloud did rayle
Adowne, as if their springes of life were spent;
That all the ground with purple bloud was sprent,
And all their armours staynd with bloudie gore,
Yet scarcely once to breath would they relent,
So mortall was their malice and so sore,
Become of fayned friendship which they vow'd afore."
— Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene, Books Three and Four)

tags: blood, friendship, malice
5 people liked it

"When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
doomed to communicate
with Satan who was us-
ing my sickness as his
home away from home,
and there’s your proof."
— Dennis Cooper

tags: proof, sickness, writing
3 people liked it

"Judas said, "Master, as you have listened to all of them, now also listen to me. For I have seen a great vision." And when Jesus heard this, he laughed and said to him, "You thirteenth daimon, why do you try so hard? But speak up, and I shall bear with you.""
— Rodolphe Kasser (The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos)

tags: jesus, judas, visions
1 person liked it

""Master, take me in along with these people." Jesus answered and said, "Your star has led you astray, Judas.""
— Rodolphe Kasser (The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos)

tags: jesus, judas, star
1 person liked it

"For there exists a great and boundless aeon, whose extent no generation of angels could see, in which is the great invisible Spirit, which no eye of an angel has ever seen, no thought of the heart has ever comprehended, and it was never called by any name."
— Rodolphe Kasser (The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos)

tags: aeon, boundless
1 person liked it

""Let twelve angels come into being to rule over chaos and the underworld." And look, from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means in translation 'rebel'; others call him Yaldabaoth."
— Rodolphe Kasser (The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos)

tags: angel, rebel
1 person liked it

""But God caused knowledge to be given to Adam and those with him, so that the kings of chaos and the underworld might not lord it over them." [--Jesus]"
— Rodolphe Kasser (The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos)

tags: knowledge
1 person liked it

""...Then they will fornicate in my name and slay their children [...] in my name, and your star will rule over the thirteenth aeon." And after that Jesus laughed. Judas said, "Master, why are you laughing at us?" Jesus answered and said, "I am not laughing at you but at the error of the stars, because these six stars wander about with these five combatants, and they all will be destroyed along with their creatures.""
— Rodolphe Kasser (The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos)

1 person liked it

""But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who bears me. Already your horn has been raised, and your wrath has been kindled, and your star has passed by, and your heart has become strong." [--Jesus to Judas]"
— Rodolphe Kasser (The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos)

tags: heart, horn, star, wrath
1 person liked it

""Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. And the star that leads the way is your star." So Judas lifted up his eyes and saw the luminous cloud, and he entered it."
— Rodolphe Kasser (The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos)

tags: judas, knowledge, star
1 person liked it

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