Camden Dorsett > Camden's Quotes

“Sir, no amount of money, no matter how vast, could induce me to stroll, perambulate, promenade, or engage in any form of locomotion with you whatsoever. Good evening.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, These Shallow Graves

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“My thinking has always been that if love, marriage, and family were intrinsically so meaningful, so exceptional, and so necessary, then we wouldn't need millennia of propaganda selling them to us.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“Paradoxically, it is friendship that often offers us the real route to the pleasures that Romanticism associates with love. That this sounds surprising is only a reflection of how underdeveloped our day-to-day vision of friendship has become. We associate it with a casual acquaintance we see only once in a while to exchange inconsequential and shallow banter. But real friendship is something altogether more profound and worthy of exultation. It is an arena in which two people can get a sense of each other’s vulnerabilities, appreciate each other’s follies without recrimination, reassure each other as to their value and greet the sorrows and tragedies of existence with wit and warmth. Culturally and collectively, we have made a momentous mistake which has left us both lonelier and more disappointed than we ever needed to be. In a better world, our most serious goal would be not to locate one special lover with whom to replace all other humans but to put our intelligence and energy into identifying and nurturing a circle of true friends. At the end of an evening, we would learn to say to certain prospective companions, with an embarrassed smile as we invited them inside – knowing that this would come across as a properly painful rejection – ‘I’m so sorry, couldn’t we just be … lovers?”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“People are bad, always, because they are in difficulty. They slander, gossip, denigrate, and growl because they are not in a good place. Though they may seem strong, though their attacks can place them in an apparently dominant role, their ill intentions are all the proof we require to know as a certainty that they are not well. Contented people have no need to hurt others.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“but people simply never need to harm others if they are not first tormented themselves.”
― The School of Life (PUK Rights), The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“We should at all points spare ourselves the burden of loneliness. We are far from the only ones to be suffering. Everyone is more anxious than they are inclined to tell us. Even the tycoon and the couple in love are in pain. We have collectively failed to admit to ourselves how much anxiety is our default state.”
― The School of Life, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

“It is not the man who has too little that is poor, but the one who hankers after more.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

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