Emma > Emma's Quotes

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

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“Write something, even if it's just a suicide note. ”
― Gore Vidal

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”
― Hemingway, Ernest

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis

“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either - Or

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.”
― e.e. cummings

“I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness”
― E.E. Cummings, Poems, 1923-1954

“When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.”
― Kay Ryan, Say Uncle

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
― George S. Patton

“Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
― Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

“The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
― Albert Einstein

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”
― Pauline Kael

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs