Zoe > Zoe's Quotes

“When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“...a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
― James Michener

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“Do you believe in fairies?...If you believe, clap your hands!”
― J.M. Barrie

“In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.”
― Thurgood Marshall

“Literature is humanity talking to itself.”
― Norman Rush

“We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”
― Ira Glass

“A line is a fuse
that's lit.
The line smolders,
the rhyme explodes—
and by a stanza
a city
is blown to bits.”
― Vladimir Mayakovsky

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
― John Muir