Lisbeth > Lisbeth's Quotes

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
"Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I'm always brilliant after the fact.”
― Shelly Fredman, No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

“It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.”
― Uta Hagen, A Challenge For The Actor

“The need to be loved and protected is at a peak when we feel abandoned and are particularly vulnerable to difficult circumstances.”
― Uta Hagen

“We must overcome the notion that we must be regular... it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre.”
― Uta Hagen

“All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide.
The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence.
Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“What is war?' I asked.
Oh, it's a messy, stupid business,' he said, 'Two sides wave flags and beat drums and shoot one another dead. It always begins this way, making speeches, talking about rights, and all that sort of thing.'
But what is it for? What do they get out of it?'
I don't know,' he said. 'To tell you the truth, I don't think they know themselves.”
― Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary

“I suppose once you've been accused of being a witch, you're never really safe. People may blame all sorts of accidents and misfortunes on you.”
― Hugh Lofting, The Twilight of Magic

“Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind; and he started muttering to himself,

"Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed--No, my mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes--hundreds of 'em--cubs; and--"

"Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?" asked the Doctor.

"Why, of course!" said Jip. "And those are only a few of the easy smells--the strong ones. Any mongrel could smell those with a cold in the head. Wait now, and I'll tell you some of the harder scents that are coming on this wind--a few of the dainty ones."

Then the dog shut his eyes tight, poked his nose straight up in the air and sniffed hard with his mouth half-open.

For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream.

"Bricks," he whispered, very low--"old yellow bricks, crumbling with age in a garden-wall; the sweet breath of young cows standing in a mountain-stream; the lead roof of a dove-cote--or perhaps a
granary--with the mid-day sun on it; black kid gloves lying in a bureau-drawer of walnut-wood; a dusty road with a horses' drinking-trough beneath the sycamores; little mushrooms bursting
through the rotting leaves; and--and--and--"

"Any parsnips?" asked Gub-Gub.

"No," said Jip. "You always think of things to eat. No parsnips whatever.”
― Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange