Isabel J > Isabel J's Quotes

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  • #1
    Günter Grass
    “And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.”
    Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

  • #2
    Jacques Lacan
    “by Baudelaire! things are pretty hot!”
    Jacques Lacan

  • #3
    Roberto Bolaño
    “Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine.”
    Roberto Bolaño, 2666

  • #4
    “Who, we might ask, can afford to dream of a right body? Who believes that such a body exists?”
    Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity

  • #5
    Édouard Louis
    “It took me a long time to understand that she wasn't being incoherent or contradictory, but rather that it was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values—that incoherence appears to exist only when you fail to reconstruct the logic that lies behind any given discourse or practice. I came to understand that many different forms of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, as she would say, she'd 'made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids,' and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other.”
    Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule

  • #6
    “It is indeed strange that we find it so difficult to welcome...the blissful nature of the loss of the power of selfhood—a power it was, in any case, always an illusion to think we possessed.”
    Leo Bersani, Intimacies

  • #7
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    “I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”
    Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

  • #8
    Alejo Carpentier
    “So descending into Hell was just a waste of time?' cried Esteban.”
    Alejo Carpentier

  • #9
    Walker Percy
    “At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.”
    Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

  • #10
    Sylvia Plath
    “And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #11
    Paulo Freire
    “Conditioned by the position of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven.”
    Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

  • #12
    Roberto Bolaño
    “That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen too much to believe it.'

    "It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing.”
    Roberto Bolaño 2666

  • #13
    Anne Garréta
    “And indeed, how was I to explain this apparent absurdity: that it is possible to have feelings, to suffer for them, and at the same time to be unable to cut oneself off from them or to have any contempt for them.”
    Anne Garréta, Sphinx

  • #14
    Saul Bellow
    “Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes "normal." You don't miss the foundation of feeling until you begin to look for your self and can't find a support in the affects for a self.”
    Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

  • #15
    John Updike
    “It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.”
    John Updike, Rabbit Redux

  • #16
    Svetlana Alexievich
    “We live in an environment of banality. For most people, that's enough. But how do you get through? How do you rip off that coating of banality? You have to make people descend into the depths of themselves.”
    Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

  • #17
    Haruki Murakami
    “I'm only 16," she said, "and I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”
    Haruki Murakami



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