Ari > Ari's Quotes

“But are you aware of the courage, the audacity which my profession requires? Very few people are gifted for it. I had the vocation. It showed very early in my capacity for deluding myself... What I corrupted was what is called the truth in favour of a marvellous world. I could always improve on the facts... The smoke issuing from Aladdin's lamp was my first smokescreen, and the lies learned from fairytales were my first perjuries. Let us say I had perverted tendencies: I believed everything I read. I never found a way to get what I wanted except by robbery.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“[English] fails me utterly when I attempt to describe what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.”
― Donna Tartt

“I was enchanted by the world of rock music - the way the singers could scream of good and evil, proclaim themselves angels or devils... Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their performances. It was barbaric and cerebral... There was something vampiric about rock music... the way the electricity could stretch a single note forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, the music.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“Let us take a man - a very ordinary man. A man with no idea of murder in his heart. There is in him somewhere a strain of weakness - deep down. It has so far never been called into play... But let us suppose that something occurs... He may stumble by accident on a secret - a secret involving life or death to someone. And his first impulse will be to speak out - to do his duty as an honest citizen. And then the strain of weakness tells... That is the beginning... He is not the same man he was - say, a year ago. His moral fibre is blunted. He is desperate. He is fighting a losing battle, and he is prepared to take any means that come to his hand, for exposure means ruin to him. And so - the dagger strikes... Afterwards, the dagger removed, he will be himself again, normal, kindly. But if the need again arises, then once more he will strike.”
― Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

“Because I could not stop for death
he kindly stopped for me
I asked to see a photograph
confirming his identity

The faces matched - the eyes were warm -
the hair was long and grey -
both smiled but as I tried to move
death blocked my way.

No no, my sweetheart, what's the rush?
Come on, let's go to bed,
there's time for love, there's surely time
for happiness - death said.

His voice was soft, his skin was pale,
his fingers brushed my face -
Oh? time for love? I said - but where?
He said: I know a place.

He led me down a flowered track
and on a bank of earth
he loved me till my body screamed
from every living nerve.

I slept then for eternity
drugged as I was with love:
death bent down to my sleeping face
and on earth's pillow made a place
to leave his photograph.”
― Martin Crimp, Cyrano de Bergerac: in a free adaptation

“It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of 'passing emotion', and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“The city rises up around them. It has been described as a place through which we move - travelling towards, away from or past one another. Even endings are moved through as if they were punctuation rather than conclusion. But the city is also a place of arrest. We have to negotiate its traffic and its architecture as well as each other. And there are always too many of us, moving too slowly, encumbered, perhaps lost. An ending is built after the fact, just like the beginning. It can take years. Detail has to pass into memory, feeling into story, so that what we recall is brightly painted, sturdily constructed, accessible, predictable and satisfactory. We can point it from far away and others can see it clearly. Like the tallest towers in the city, from a distance, our beginnings and endings are all that can be seen.”
― Lavinia Greenlaw, In the City of Love's Sleep

“Aggressive? Does she mean - tall? Because... I can't change that... No, the bottom drops out of my planet. The planet of me. The planet that has always tried to spin as closely to friendly planets and as far from aggro ones as possible. I've never been called aggressive out loud, but it's definitely something that's floated in the air... It's because the general cloud of my presence causes disruption that I want to orbit the chill planets, the ones with the spaceship landings, the ones little kids look up through their telescopes and think... wow... that looks like a friendly planet... I work unpaid overtime at not wanting people to think I mean them harm. So now the bottom falls out of everything I live on... She's surprised to see me vulnerable. It's not a possibility she's considered. That words based on assumptions might break me. That those simple words might unleash an ocean made up of the little sips of sadness that come from being repeatedly misinterpreted as a glance... All she sees is an aggressor. Someone she needs to protect herself from at all costs, protect an audience from... The others who might have to witness me.”
― Zawe Ashton, Character Breakdown

“For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sunk down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“There is a small village graveyard in a remote corner of Russia. Like almost all of our graveyards it has a sad look. Sheep wander freely over the graves... But among them is one grave untouched by man, untrodden by beast. Two old people often come to it from a little village nearby - a husband and a wife, now infirm. Supporting each other and with heavy steps. They exchange a few words, they wipe the dust from the stone and adjust a fir branch, and they say another prayer, unable to leave this place. Are their prayers and tears really in vain? Has love, holy, devoted love, really lost its power over all? No, no! The grave may hold a passionate, sinful, rebellious heart, but the flowers growing on it gaze serenely at us with their innocent eyes. They do not only speak to us of everlasting peace. They also speak of eternal reconciliation and of life without end...”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“I'm convinced by life and death. I'm convinced by seeing a creature dear to me, bound up with me, that I've treated badly... and just when I'm hoping to make it up to her... suddenly she's in pain, she goes through agony and ceases to be. Why? There must be an answer. And I believe there is one. That's what I find convincing. You might be persuaded there is an after-life not by arguments, but by going through life hand-in-hand with somebody, and all at once that somebody vanishes there, into nowhere, and you are left standing over the abyss, staring down into it. And I have stared down into it...”
― Leo Tolstoy

“They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. A stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacingly. 'Spirit! are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more. 'They are man's,' said the Spirit looking down upon them, 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol & Other Holiday Tales

“But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime, there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate, in its simplest form.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer. I knew the time of day when though it is hot and blue and there are no clouds, the sky can have a very black look.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh, and little by little... you begin to grieve... You're on earth, there's no cure for that! Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbour as yourself! The end is in the beginning and yet you go on. Perhaps I could go on with my story, end it and begin another.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me false to my nature? Rather say I play the man I am.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“Now o'er the one-half world nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates pale Hecat's offerings; and withered Murder, alarumed by his sentinel the wolf, whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, with Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design moves like a ghost.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt because no relation of a dream can convey the dream sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, the notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams... No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone...”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder. Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked around her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“I am a phantom built out of pain. Whenever I find it hard to know what to do with myself, I imagine I have a zip fastener in my belly, from my neck to my groin, and that I'm slowly undoing it, from top to bottom. And then I pull my arms out of my arms, my legs out of my legs, and take my head off in my head. As I extract myself from my own body, it falls off me like old clothes. Underneath them, I am finer, soft, almost transparent. I have a body like a Jellyfish, white, milky, phosphorescent. This fantasy is the only thing capable of bringing me relief. Oh yes, then I am free.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“He is the butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off come my clothes. He makes his whistles out of an elder twig and that is what he uses to call the birds out of the air - all the birds come; and the sweetest singers he will keep in cages. He could thrust me into the seed-bed of next year's generation and I would have to wait until he whistled me up from my darkness before I could come back again. His skin is the tint and texture of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears bloom and fruit on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely. I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses. You sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream. His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. Women saw him and wanted to weep - to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other: that way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and that it embarrassed them and made them sad; that secretly they longed to die - to be quit of it - that sleep was more precious to them than any waking day... Behind her, bending down, his body an arc of kindness, he held her breasts in the palms of his hands. He rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“There have been five great kisses since 1642 B.C, when Saul and Delilah Korn's inadvertent discovery swept across Western civilization. (Before that couples hooked thumbs). And the precise rating of kisses is a terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy, because although everyone agrees with the formula of affection times purity times intensity times duration, no one has ever been completely satisfied with how much weight each element should receive. But on any system, there are five that everyone agrees deserve full marks. Well, this one left them all behind.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“How does distance look?' is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. It depends on light.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Jenie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things. She didn't know exactly. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard the seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the grey dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others, sceptical of their innocence which he could cajole so easily.”
― James Joyce, A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man

“One half of the face was alertly contemplating the world with expectation and confidence while the other half had fallen under the weight of it. The eyes expressed the fatigue and rancour of a small, hardworking person carrying her life around on her back like a set of symbols and circumstances that she could stand apart from and arrange.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior