Julia > Julia's Quotes

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“...she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself...”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“For to know what you know takes time. To become conscious of what you should be conscious of, takes you a day or an hour or a minute--or even a second.”
― H.T. Tsiang, The Hanging on Union Square

“Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked...”
― Marguerite Duras, L'Amante anglaise

“If I should try to put it into words, I mean how I did see her, it would be incomprehensible, for the simple reason that I find that I never did have a really clear idea of her at any time. I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. I had gathered, of course, a good deal from you, and later, after she went away, from others, but this only strengthened my confusion. The more we learn of a person, the less we know.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.”
― Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

“Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Tout le monde est une nonne.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac—with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“The trouble is,' Teddy said, 'most people don't want to see things the way they are.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people.”
― Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy

“I desire you, it's as simple and awful as that.... it's idiotic, but I love you.”
― Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy

“Do all the Americans in Paris just shoot at each other all the time?”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“I always loved twilight: it was the only time I had the feeling that something important could happen.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“Until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude...”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“...the melancholy of a world eternally under construction...”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“...and we seemed to be saying good-bye from trains rushing in opposite directions”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“...because when I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it's amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I've been in the very heart of truth. Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a strange to myself, I go home, walking the streets silently and in deep meditation, passing trams and cars and pedestrians in a cloud of books, the books I found that day and am carrying home in my briefcase. Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, never bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know. On I go through the noisy streets, never crossing at the red; I walk subconsciously unconscious, half-asleep, subliminally inspired, with every bale I've compacted that day fading softly and quietly inside me.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“A fragment for my friend--
If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in night”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not “audience.” Not “readership.” Just the reader.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides