Tegan Boundy > Tegan's Quotes

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.”
― Federico Fellini

“Say what you will, ’tis better to be left than never to have been loved.”
― William Congreve

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“Literature is humanity talking to itself.”
― Norman Rush

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

“Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.”
― Mark Twain

“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

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.”
― Xenophanes

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of
disinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and
still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.”
― Susanna Kaysen

“As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest's center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”
― oscar wilde

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself”
― D.H. Lawrence

“A friend said to me, “Hey you need to grow a pair. Grow a pair, Bro.” It’s when someone calls you weak, but they associate it with a lack of testicles. Which is weird, because testicles are the most sensitive things in the world. If you suddenly just grew a pair, you’d be a lot more vulnerable. If you want to be tough, you should lose a pair. If you want to be real tough, you should grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
― Sheng Wang

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.”
― Stephen King, It

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft