mlact > mlact's Quotes

“For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“You see when a new baby laughs for the first time a new fairy is born, and as there are always new babies there are always new fairies. They live in nests on the tops of trees; and the mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.”
― J.M. Barrie

“...and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to mind with ambiguous alterations--sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die--die, sweetly die--into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“Haven’t you been listening to a single thing I’ve told you? I loved Celia, but I also, before her, loved Don. In fact, I’m positive that if Don hadn’t turned out to be a spectacular asshole, I probably never would have been capable of falling in love with someone else at all. I’m bisexual. Don’t ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box, Monique. Don’t do that.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else's muse.
I am not a muse.
I am the somebody.
End of fucking story.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“The clearest metaphor I had for my own gender identity in college was the image of a scale. A huge weight had been placed on one side, without my permission. I was constantly trying to weigh down the other side. But the end goal wasn't masculinity - the goal was
b a l a n c e.”
― Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer: A Memoir

“As I pondered a pronoun change, I began to think of gender less as a scale and more as a landscape. Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.”
― Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer: A Memoir

“My deepest emotional relationships have always been with women. Did that mean I was a lesbian? But my sexual fantasies involved two male partners. Was I a gay boy tapped in a girl's body? The knowledge of a third option slept like a seed under the soil.”
― Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer: A Memoir

“Music is a foreign language which everyone knows but only musicians can speak.”
― Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1981-2011, With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes, and Miscellany

“Art is edited truth — edited to give it shape, rhythm, speed and punch. I've quoted the Communist dictum before: "If it isn't art, it isn't propaganda." Art is skill in the service of passion.”
― Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1981-2011, With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes, and Miscellany

“Love is so painful, how could you ever wish it on anybody? And love is so essential, how could you ever stand in its way?”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“But then I get that feeling I do, to make art is selfish. To art is forgetful, even if what I try to forget still finds its way on the canvas; even in its absence, I am avoiding it all, wanting everything else I’ve never had. …”
― Ari Tison, Saints of the Household

“Okay, so can I really TRUST ANYONE?

Well, it can be difficult to decide who to trust. If you're not sure if you can trust a source, ask a librarian. Librarians are trained to help you find reliable information.”
― Elise Gravel

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
― Charles Dickens

“At home in Albuquerque, I can sense the mountains, all the time. Like even when I'm not looking at it, I feel it. It's always there, in the east. Like a wall at my back, holding me up. Steadying me. If I'd been born here instead, maybe the ocean would be like that for me. Maybe I'd always feel the water churning in the west.”
― Shannon C.F. Rogers, Eighteen Roses

“I really like drumming. While I'm doing it, I am aware of the sixty-five moments that Jiko says are in the snap of a finger. I'm serious. When you're beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise. Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.
Jiko says that is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“It seems truer to say that friendship is just hard. It requires radical honesty.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“It is very trying to be friends with someone who's right all the time.”
― Melinda Taub, The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch

“She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it — a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“But he could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“But this question of love... this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had that not, after all, been love?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“So there you have it. Philosophy, Law, Literature, and the Economy, all sacrificed to the glorious cause of War. How splendid is that?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being