Mari "Annie" Arcana > Mari 's Quotes

“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“What's wrong with my proposition?'
Poirot rose. 'If you will forgive me for being personal - I do not like your face”
― Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man”
― Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Art is not one great act of creation, but many small ones. When you read one of my poems, you fail to see the weeks of careful work it took me to build it--the thinking, the scratched-out words, the pages I burned in disgust. All you see, in the end, is what I want you to see.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are
presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new
evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is
extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it
is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize,
ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks