Wendy Blacke > Wendy's Quotes

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love―just enough to feed the birds.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Even though the suitcase was heavy I carried it by the handle as I walked into the departure hall. I detested the tiny wheels, first of all because they were feminine, thus not worthy of a man, a man should carry, not roll, secondly because they suggested easy options, shortcuts, savings, rationality, which I despised and opposed wherever I could, even where it was of the most trivial significance. Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight? Were we just images? And what were we actually saving energy for with these energy-saving devices?”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“For the moment I can think of nothing— except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Haven't you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed?

All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that's everywhere and nowhere?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The cancer of time is eating us away”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity-I belong to the earth!”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“It is getting toward dinner time and people are straggling back to their rooms with that weary, dejected air which comes from earning a living honestly.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Words are loneliness.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, it’s gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Shall I project a world?”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Me, I'm a bloody tissue sample dried on a bare mattress in my room at the Paper Street Soap Company.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse