Giulia > Giulia's Quotes

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Marianne, he said, I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― 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

“He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain in tact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“It's -' You pause, frowning to yourself as you reach for the right expression. 'You can't live in a vacuum. And when you let people in and you make yourself vulnerable, they're able to have an effect on you. If that makes sense.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“There is a difference between being looked at and being seen.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“I wonder about choices. How we resent them, and how we regret them—even as we watch them grow.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution