Carmen > Carmen's Quotes

“I couldn’t forgive her for not being there, for having allowed death to snatch her, to tear her from my clumsy arms. I chastised myself for not having held on to her, for not having understood that she couldn’t go on any more. I told myself that I’d abandoned her because I was frigid, as I had been all my life, as I shall be when I die, and so I was unable to hug her warmly, and that my heart was frozen, unfeeling, and that I hadn’t realised that I was desperate.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“She was myrtle. She was pencil pine.
She was richea and scoparia and cushion plant, and each in turn vanished, tree grass moss; all these things in turn she became always had been without knowing, all of it all the world in her, all of it all of her vanishing -- shot bulldozed logged mined developed poisoned choked beaten burning burnt.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

“Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“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

“Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“But it prompted me to remember something, a conversation I’d overheard between Officers Bloomington and Mishin about the persecution complex that afflicts most humans, and made me wonder: Why do you feel persecuted by us? From the mild feeling of being teased without your consent all the way to the other extreme of the terror of recognition, that we might expose you for what you truly are. What use is a sense of self if all it does is make you feel that self to be constantly under siege?”
― Ceridwen Dovey, Only the Animals

“Before, they had laughed at me, despising me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hated me for my knowledge and understanding. Why? What in God's name did they want of me?”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I veer rhapsodic; my prose purples.”
― Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods, I who have never known men.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves,”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“At times, it seems she's thinking like she really can.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“Go on then, Sylvanas Windrunner. Tell me these truths you have never shared.”
― Christie Golden, Sylvanas

“I want to survive this. She is surprised by the depth and clarity of her desire.”
― Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling

“And now Christine felt as if her face was bursting open and glowing coals were being birthed from it, quickening into life and swarming across her face and all her limbs, and everything within her face had sprung to life, a fiery swarming all across her body. In the lightning’s pallid glow she saw, long-legged and venomous, innumerable black spiderlings scurrying down her limbs and out into the night, and as they vanished they were followed, long-legged and venomous, by innumerable others.”
― Jeremias Gotthelf, Die schwarze Spinne

“Christine always wanted to know what was afoot, and any matter on which she was prevented from giving her opinion she took to be going badly.”
― Jeremias Gotthelf, Die schwarze Spinne

“When you report back to the Inquisitor . . .” His voice faltered. “Say that I am sorry.”
― Patrick Weekes, Tevinter Nights

“He existed, knew what he loved, and that he had been loved, and that somehow seemed enough in the moment.”
― Chris Bain, Tevinter Nights

“The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“You know nothing... And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I wanted none of it finally. And, deserving nothing better, I closed up like a spider in the flame of a match. And even Armand who was my constant companion, and my only companion, existed at a great distance from me, beyond that veil which separated me from all living things, a veil which was a form of shroud.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“My last sunrise,’ said the vampire. ‘That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw my last sunrise.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And what truly lies before you is vampire nature, which is killing. For I guarantee you that if you walk the streets tonight and strike down a woman as rich and beautiful as Babette and suck her blood until she drops at your feet you will have no hunger left for Babette's profile in the candlelight or for listening by the window for the sound of her voice. You will be filled, Louis, as you were meant to be, with all the life that you can hold; and you will have hunger when that's gone for the same, and the same, and the same. The red in this glass will be just as red; the roses on the wallpaper just as delicately drawn. And you'll see the moon the same way, and the same the flicker of a candle. And with that same sensibility that you cherish you will see death in all its beauty, life as it is only known on the very point of death. Don't you understand that, Louis? You alone of all creatures can see death that way with impunity. You...alone...under the rising moon...can strike like the hand of God!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Presently the possums came prancing out on to the dim moonlit slates of the roof. With squeals and grunts they wove obscenely about the squat base of the tower, dark against the paling sky.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune's quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison.”
― Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk