Inga > Inga's Quotes

“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.”
― Werner Herzog

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
― Henry Miller

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“I couldn't be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“You can see wealth in people no matter what they're wearing. It's in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness. When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.”
― Joy Williams

“She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She'd really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She'd have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow - no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.”
― Joy Williams

“Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.”
― Joy Williams

“We are saved not because we are worthy. We are saved because we are loved.”
― Joy Williams

“Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.”
― Joy Williams

“Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.”
― Joy Williams, Ill Nature

“Perhaps the human race had yet to be born. Perhaps it was all a deception by the government. It hadn't happened yet. This life was nothing but the womb.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.

A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.

Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.”
― Joy Williams

“We would all rather be loved for what we seem to be.”
― Nick Laird, Glover's Mistake

“That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.”
― Renata Adler

“You can rely too much, my love, on the unspoken things. And the wry smile. I have that smile myself, and I've learned the silence too, over the years. Along with your expressions, like No notion and Of necessity. What happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it's more like late one afternoon, and it's not just unsaid, it's gone. That's all. Just gone. I remember this word, that look, that small inflection, after all this. I used to hold them, trust them, read them like a rune. Like a sign that there was a house, a billet, a civilization where we were. I look back and I think I was just there all alone. Collecting wisps and signs.”
― Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

“But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life”
― Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
― John Steinbeck

“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America