Amélie > Amélie's Quotes

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“Conventionality is not morality.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I am no bird, no net ensnares me.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I feel like the word shatter.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew.

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Play it fuckin' loud!”
― Bob Dylan

“Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.”
― Bob Dylan

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”
― Bob Dylan

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
― Bob Dylan

“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”
― Bob Dylan

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”
― Bob Dylan

“I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.”
― Bob Dylan

“Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.”
― Bob Dylan

“You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
― Bob Dylan

“Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“How does it feel, how does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”
― Bob Dylan

“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“. . I wonder if I’ll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

“The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“I like good strong words that mean something…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women