k > k's Quotes

“In front of my mother and my sisters, I pretend love is cheap and vulgar. I act like it’s a sin–I pretend that love is for women on a dark path. But at night I dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb. I dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.”
― Salma Deera

“People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

“envy is the only deadly sin that's no fun for the sinner”
― Kaveh Akbar, Portrait of the Alcoholic

“My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not
          harmless. You are not
                    breathing.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Asfixia

“Sex pretty much cures everything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling.
The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Bird 1: This is the wrong story.
Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“I cut off my head and threw it in the sky. It turned into birds. I called it thinking.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“Can we love nature for what it really is: predatory? We do not walk through a passive landscape. The paint dries eventually. We collide with place, which is another name for God, and limp away with a permanent injury. Ask for a blessing? You can try, but we will not remain unscathed.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Humans need something other than the human world, or else they go mad.”
― John N. Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

“Living life as an artist is a practice.
You are either engaging in the practice
or you’re not.

It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it.
It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.”
You are either living as a monk or you’re not.

We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output.

The real work of the artist
is a way of being in the world.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“I feel like I’m the only one who feels the things I feel, or thinks the way I think.  I’m worried that I’m taking everything too seriously, or not seriously enough.  Sometimes I want you to see me, and sometimes I want to disappear.  I don’t know if I’ve ever truly felt like the ground beneath me was firm.  Things always feel like they’re moving and I never get the chance to catch up to them and when I do, it feels like it all goes too quickly.  I am nice to people I don’t like because I don’t know what else to do.  I feel like I’m waiting for something but I don’t know what it is.  I often walk past people in the street, and I wonder if anyone else is waiting too.  I don’t know if I’m ever, really, “Here.” So I'm fine.* *I'm not fine.”
― Iain S. Thomas, Every Word You Cannot Say

“You can hide so much, you forget what it's like to be found. ”
― Iain S. Thomas, Every Word You Cannot Say

“I know that, sometimes, you wish someone would just say the words you needed to hear because, sometimes, you don't even know what those words are. ”
― Iain S. Thomas, Every Word You Cannot Say

“Kindness is not a currency, and if you treat it like one, then that is not kindness.”
― Iain S. Thomas, Every Word You Cannot Say

“I lack nothing I need unless you count everything I want”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“I am not a slow learner
I am a quick forgetter
such erasing makes one voracious
if you teach me something beautiful
I will name it quickly before it floats away”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“I feel most like a person when I am forcing something to be silent,”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Much of being alive is breaking”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.”
― Louis Theroux, The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures

“How odd, I thought, that even though I don't believe it still feels nice to be included.”
― Louis Theroux, The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures