Iris Chen > Iris's Quotes

“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I feel very, very alone."

"We're all alone, Reva," I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you’re too weak, and you’re too strong. And you have no place to go in the world.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Henry’s a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman — very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He’s a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he’s made himself what he is by sheer strength of will. His aspiration is to be this Platonic creature of pure rationality and that’s why he’s attracted to the Classics, and particularly to the Greeks — all those high, cold ideas of beauty and perfection.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in the cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that's just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn't give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive—because we have to.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it's just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Sub-atomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you'll find nothing. We're mostly empty space. We're mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we're all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don't mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don't forget that.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History