S. > S.'s Quotes

“All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.”
― Anais Nin

“There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”
― Anais Nin

“When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.”
― Marguerite Duras

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”
― Marguerite Duras, Summer Rain

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
― Marcel Proust

“Every angel is terrifying.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

“When she raises her eyelids, it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.”
― Colette, Claudine and Annie

“How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.”
― Marquis de Sade, Les Prosperites du Vice

“What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.”
― Marquis de Sade

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. ”
― Virginia Woolf

“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”
― jean cocteau

“Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.”
― Henry Miller

“There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy”
― Henry Miller

“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself”
― Henry Miller

“Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.”
― Natalie Clifford Barney

“Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.”
― Natalie Clifford Barney

“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

“Trust me, I'm telling you stories.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Powerbook

“I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times & intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.”
― Gustave Courbet