Scarlett Sims > Scarlett's Quotes

“There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”
― Betrand Russell

“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”
― William Faulkner

“If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it.”
― Charles Seife

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“My life is a reading list.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Is it not strange that sheep's guts could hail souls out of men's bodies?”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls