Grace Black > Grace's Quotes

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.”
― Don DeLillo, Valparaiso

“I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
― Freidrich Neitzsche

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

“Facts are lonely things”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit.”
― Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

“Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“I write emotional algebra.”
― Anais Nin

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems

“Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.”
― Ved Mehta, All for Love

“He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, the tip flaring an angry red. “Isn’t love a beautiful goddamn liar?”
― Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.”
― Don DeLillo

“A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.”
― Don DeLillo

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.”
― Will Shortz

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book