Daisy Burckin > Daisy's Quotes

“You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“What is more, you were born a woman,
And women, though most helpless in doing good deeds,
Are of every evil the cleverest of contrivers”
― Euripedes, Medea of Euripides

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It's such an intimate thing, to witness another's death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Theseus: Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend.

Herakles: I fear to stain your clothes with blood.

Theseus: Stain them, I don't care.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“The best portion of your life will be the small, nameless moments you spend smiling with someone who matters to you.”
― Ritu Ghatourey

“It's pathetic, I knew I did from that first moment we met. It was...not love at first sight exactly, but - familiarity. Like: oh, hello, it's you. It's going to be you. Game over."
-Ben”
― Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello

“We grow. It hurts at first.”
― Sylvia Plath

“I don't want to have to be the one who mourns everything when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It's mortifying. It's mortifying to be the one who remembers.”
― Ryan O'Connell

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place. Like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“There is something big coming, bigger than aloneness. She's staying up all night for it.”
― Sharon Olds, One Secret Thing

“But the thing is, even if I could go back, I wouldn't belong there anymore.”
― Ccz

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Can't you make them stop?' I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“We talk about love like it's an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“J'ai tué ma mère à ce moment-là”
― Annie Ernaux, Happening

“Au Japon, on appelle les embryons avortés "mizuko", les enfants de l'eau”
― Annie Ernaux, Happening

“Mais, de la même façon que rien n'aurait pu m'empêcher d'avoir un avortement, rien ne pouvait l'arrêter d'en faire. À cause de l'argent naturellement, peut-être aussi d'un sentiment d'être utile aux femmes.”
― Annie Ernaux, Happening

“Elle adoucit son refus par des caresses si tendres et si passionnées, que moi, qui ne vivais que dans elle, et qui n’avais pas la moindre défiance de son cœur, j’applaudis à toutes ses réponses et à toutes ses résolutions”
― Prévost, Manon Lescaut

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“It's amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You're different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe