Maria > Maria's Quotes

“Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling.
The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“You'd break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“How do we tell the sea that we are drowning on land?”
― Anonymous

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“He was swimming in a sea of other people’s expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.”
― Robert Jordan, New Spring

“He just thought quietly, 'So this is love. I see, I was wrong about it too', thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. [...] 'Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,' he thought quietly. 'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet ... AM has won, simply ... he has taken his revenge ...

I have no mouth. And I must scream.”
― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“How did it get so late so soon?”
― Dr. Seuss

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
― Charles Darwin, The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin

“In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Wonder. Go on and wonder.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects