Ava Sfez > Ava's Quotes

“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.”
― Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

“Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets, I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.”
― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.”
― William S. Burroughs

“There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“When you stop growing you start dying.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot.”
― Émile Michel Cioran

“Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.”
― Karl Kraus

“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.”
― Karl Kraus

“This life is what you make it. No matter what, you're going to mess up sometimes, it's a universal truth. But the good part is you get to decide how you're going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends - they'll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, some go. The ones that stay with you through everything - they're your true best friends. Don't let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they'll come and go too. And baby, I hate to say it, most of them - actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can't give up because if you give up, you'll never find your soulmate. You'll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything. Just because you fail once, doesn't mean you're gonna fail at everything. Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don't, then who will, sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life's a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
― Dr. Seuss

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen

“Who are you to judge the life I live?
I know I'm not perfect
-and I don't live to be-
but before you start pointing fingers...
make sure you hands are clean!”
― Bob Marley

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I don't want to die without any scars.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities