Terra > Terra's Quotes

“Fact One: Races are won or lost in key moments. Fact Two: Success in the sport is, above all else, about enduring suffering.”
― Chris McCormack, I'm Here To Win: A World Champion's Advice for Peak Performance

“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“My ambition was to live like music.”
― Mary Gaitskill

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.”
― Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance

“Sometimes,' she said, 'it takes a woman to bring out the best in a man.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“...there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you've got, being patient and forgiving and... undemanding...maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“We wouldn't be alive without love we wouldn't have survived without running maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“I can be a regular bitch. Just try me.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

“She went around with the attitude that she would rather be beaten to death than take any shit.”
― Stieg Larsson

“What she had realized was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

“Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

“When John took those naked pictures, the most popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.
I drop the rag in the bucket and smoke some more, ashing into the sink,. A tiny piece of the movie from the naked time plays on my eyeball: A psychotic killer is blowing up amusement parks. At the head of the crowd clamoring to ride the roller coaster is a slim, lovely man with long blond hair and floppy clothes and big, beautiful eyes fixed on a tiny strip of light that only he can see.”
― Mary Gaitskill

“If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.”
― Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda

“Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.”
― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

“Want to talk third wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk, and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself.
A damsel too dumb to even know she's in distress.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff

“Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly, you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. 'There must be another one like you,' he whispered to her. 'There's got to be at least one more woman like you.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“No matter how hard we try to ignore it, the mind always knows truth and wants clarity.”
― Toni Morrison, God Help the Child

“You don't have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.”
― Toni Morrison, God Help the Child

“I wonder if it's possible to have a love affair that lasts forever.”
― Andy Warhol

“But the picking out, the choosing. Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“Life will do its best to get at you. Sneak up from behind and shatter you, into tiny unrecognizable pieces. You have to be ready to pick everything up pragmatically. Keep your head down and make it work.”
― Tommy Orange, There There