Julian > Julian's Quotes

“Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again....Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong

“It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Some parts of her I keep in my memory, others in my heart. This, I keep in my blood. And all night in bed, my blood slowly drags through my veins, bringing that moment to every piece of my body. It is beyond words. This isn't a feeling, it is a state of being.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

“The monster does not need the hero. it is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give.”
― Roberto Calasso

“The smell of near-black tea leaves torn from the green mountains of India that would travel to Britain without losing their moisture, and without losing the sharp perfume born of the tears Buddha shed for the world's suffering, suffering that also travels in tea: we drink green mountains and rain, and we also drink what the Queen drinks. We drink the Queen, we drink work, and we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves, and the broken back of the man carrying them. Thanks to steam power, we no longer drink the lash of the whip on the oarsmen's backs. But we do drink choking coal miners. And that's the way of the world: everything alive lives off the death of someone or something else. Because nothing comes from nothing.”
― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron

“I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I often look forward to a time when there won't be anything left to grow attached to. I'm tired of everything being taken away from me. Yet there's no escape, for as long as there's something for me to love in the forest, I shall love it; and if some day there is nothing, I shall stop living.”
― Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

“Remember this: the world as it once was. The way things appear in the instant before they go under: first assured, then shipwrecked. The ease with which facts presumed permanent can change.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“Normality is the creepiest madness there is. This was all insane, yet it was so right.”
― Sayaka Murata, Vanishing World

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“As if she had a fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria', she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.

She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“Maria drove the freeway… She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of the Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays