Michala > Michala's Quotes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I mean," Rupert looked up at me cogiatively, "almost everyone is a homosexual, aren't they? Boys, I mean."
"I sometimes think so," I hedged.
"Is Grandpa one?"
"Good heavens, no," I protested.
"Am I one?"Rupert asked intently.
"It's a bit early to say yet, old fellow. But you could be, you know."
"Goody!" he squealed, banging his heels against the front of the sofa again. "Then I can come and live with you.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“... We were just having a talk about homosexuality."
"He is frightfully interested in that at the moment, although he can't have the least idea what it is - can he? It must be the effect of his overbearing and possessive mum. Odd what little children get up to; I was a committed transvestite at his age. But that seemed to get it out of the system," he added hastily.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“One day he and Sutcliffe were walking down Madison Avenue when a man they knew came up and told them a mutual friend had just died in San Francisco. “Of it?” they gasped. “No,” the man said, “he was run over by a taxicab.” “Oh, thank God!” They both said in unison. That was where AIDS stood in the hierarchy of misfortune, somehow; in a class by itself—so grim its aura extended to the fact, he thinks as he enters the nursing home, that people who don’t have AIDS imagine somehow they’re not going to die.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Beauty of Men

“You may be paralyzed from the neck down, you may have itchy skin and only one good eye, you may wake up every day still paralyzed, still in this nursing home, you may not be able to feed, bathe, or brush your teeth or wipe your butt or walk or dance or drive a car or take a shower or do one thing you want to do, including scratching your nose but you can't die, because everyone else has and you're all I've got.”
― Andrew Holleran

“The tree of which we are branches on, makes choices yesterday, by the choices we make today.”
― Matthew Edward Hall, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine