Luke Hockey > Luke's Quotes

“It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.”
― Sigmund Freud , Civilization and Its Discontents

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”
― Alain de Botton

“I am seized by two contradictory feelings: there is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“So what you’re really saying is you’ll come only when you think you’ll be too old to care. When my kids have left. Or when I’m a grandfather. I can just see us—and on that evening, we’ll sit together and drink a strong eau-de-vie, like the grappa your father used to serve at night sometimes.”
“And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.” But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it,
never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.
Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber.
Silence.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.”
― David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

“Everybody’s looking for their tiny piece of meaning. Some fleeting, perfect thing that might make them more alive.”
― Kate Tempest, The Bricks that Built the Houses

“How many yous have you been?
How many,
Lined up inside,
Each killing the last?”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: "I'll go take a hot bath.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“I forgive. Cause nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do (and also tend disappointingly to die before they ought). Or our fathers, whose failings while they’re alive (and absences after they’re dead) infuriate. Or our siblings, who want us dead too cause what they know about us is that somehow we got away with not having to carry the bricks and stones like they did all those years. Cause nobody’s the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves – except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.”
― Ali Smith, How to Be Both

“To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Un conto ancora aperto

“Remember what it was like when you’d be getting ready to jump rope... two people were turning it, and you were waiting for exactly the right moment to jump in? I feel like that all the time.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“I don't think you ever get to relax. I mean, sure there's a couple of people who could, but I bet they don't. Because by the time they get to where they could relax, they don't. Because by the time they get to where they could relax, they've gotten completely used to not being able to. How do you just suddenly become somebody who relaxes? The kind of ambition you need to get to that place is not relaxing. It's searing. I think there's probably something about living your whole life in a popularity contest -- trying to get people to like you who you couldn't give a flying fuck about -- that kills relaxation.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“The, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“That Love is all there is
Is all we know of Love,
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.”
― Emily Dickinson