Eavan > Eavan's Quotes

“No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“How can it be that I’ve never seen that lofty sky before? Oh, how happy I am to have found it at last. Yes! It’s all vanity, it’s all an illusion, everything except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing – that’s all there is. But there isn’t even that. There’s nothing but stillness and peace. Thank God for that!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I have loved to the limit of my strength. No one has a right to ask more of any human being.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“When I kiss Agathon my soul is on my lips, where it comes, poor thing, hoping to cross over.”
― Plato

“Too late, too late, your love gave me life. Here am I the creature you made through your loving; by your passion you created the thing that I am. Who are you to deny me the right to love? But for you I need never have known existence.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.”
― Shūsaku Endō, Silence

“I have sometimes lost friends, but friends have never lost me.”
― Natalie Clifford Barney

“—and some feminists say it’s her own fault for living with him, and she hides her dark red velvet wounds from pride, the pride of the victim, the pride of the victim at not being the perpetrator, the pride of the victim at not knowing how to withhold love.”
― Robin Morgan, Death Benefits: Poems

“If our love is a sin, then heaven must be full of such tender and selfless sinning as ours.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“The more we delve into the essence of personality, the more we learn that in this world, certainly rich with natural beauty and things worthy of seeing, nothing is more attractive and worthier of knowing and experiencing than people.”
― Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress

“Friendship is more dangerous than love, since its roots are stronger and go deeper than the roots of love. The anguish of friendship is more bitter than the anguish of love. Certain souls love friendship as others love love; they suffer through friendship as others through love. They have in their lives only one friendship as others have but a single love. It is when they lose friendship that they despair hopelessly.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“ When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.”
― Natalie Clifford Barney

“And so I have remained, in relentless pursuit of truth and excellence, an unforgiving executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few people who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them.”
― Louise Brooks

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Then Stephen must tell her the cruel truth, she must say: ‘I am one of those whom God marked on the forehead. Like Cain, I am marked and blemished. If you come to me, Mary, the world will abhor you, will persecute you, will call you unclean. Our love may be faithful even unto death and beyond — yet the world will call it unclean. We may harm no living creature by our love; we may grow more perfect in understanding and in charity because of our loving; but all this will not save you from the scourge of a world that will turn away its eyes from your noblest actions, finding only corruption and vileness in you. You will see men and women defiling each other, laying the burden of their sins upon their children. You will see unfaithfulness, lies and deceit among those whom the world views with approbation. You will find that many have grown hard of heart, have grown greedy, selfish, cruel and lustful; and then you will turn to me and will say: “You and I are more worthy of respect than these people. Why does the world persecute us, Stephen?” And I shall answer: “Because in this world there is only toleration for the so-called normal.” And when you come to me for protection, I shall say: “I cannot protect you, Mary, the world has deprived me of my right to protect; I am utterly helpless, I can only love you”.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“But do try to remember this: even the world’s not so black as it’s painted.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -categories like that- won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“We're not courting trouble," I say. "Flirting with it, at most.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“It occurs to me then that perhaps getting my little sister drunk and explaining why I screw boys is not the most responsible move on my part.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Amor vincit omnia, et nos cedamus amori.
Love conquers all things, so we too shall yield to love.”
― Virgil, Eclogues

“On the way between nothingness and God, we dance and weep.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis

“Sometimes I don't understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?'
For a moment he did not answer.  Taking up the decanter he held it to the light.
'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.'  She came toward him.  'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this.  Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“I wept in my dreams.
I dreamed you lay in the grave;
I awoke, and the tears
still poured down my cheeks.

I wept in my dreams,
I dreamed you had left me;
I awoke and I went on weeping
long and bitterly.

I wept in my dreams,
I dreamed you were still kind to me;
I awoke, and still
the flow of my tears streams on.
”
― Heinrich Heine