frumpburger > frumpburger's Quotes

“We were meant to survive because of our minds' ability to reason, our ability to live with frustration in order to maintain our virtue. We wore smiling masks while dying inside.”
― Anchee Min

“With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.”
― Anaïs Nin, House of Incest

“The Victim was a chronic fuck-up. People Like her always seemed to hang out with The Poisonous Cunt. In turn, she kept their self-esteem low and made sure that they stayed in psychic immiseration. She was a curator of dead souls.”
― Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy

“I used to come home at night full of inspiration, and sit up with a bottle of Scotch. As I wrote, the words seemed wonderful, just too wonderful to be coming from me. Next morning I always found they were terrible and I could never use anything I wrote.”
― Gypsy Rose Lee

“It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Despite her light skin, despite the obviousness that more of her ancestors had owned slaves than had been them, how could she lose? We're open like that. We like to know that people love us; we don't care how they look.”
― Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape from a Leper Colony

“Fucking black was fucking exotic. And America loves to fuck exotic. Put black vengeance and white guilt together in the same bed and you had a night to remember!”
― Dany Laferrière, How to Make Love to a Negro

“It totally was elitist,' Julia says. 'So? There's nothing wrong with elitist. Some stuff is better than other stuff; pretending it's not doesn't make you open-minded, it just makes you a dick.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I think it's fair to say I am a writer. I'm using this journal to get better: to hone my skills, to collect details and observations. To show don't tell and all that other writerly crap.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with it.”
― Elaine Dundy

“When you are gay and alone and want to be a poet, suicide crosses your mind at twenty-two like an impresario’s cape.”
― Paul Monette

“its no surprise to me that anyone hardly tells the truth about how they feel. The smart ones keep to themselves for good reason. Why would you want to tell anyone anything that's dear to you?
Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer to them? It's so painful to be next to someone you feel so strongly about and know you can't say the things you want to.”
― Henry Rollins

“It's sad that he doesn't know why I didn't respond to his seedy nightclub-owner gestures; it's sad that I end up convincing myself somehow that the man capable of making them is a significant and valuable figure in my life.”
― Nick Hornby

“How did you know that it was time to give up? Was it when you were thirty-eight and still hadn’t found an agent (as they suspected had happened to Joel)? Was it when you were forty and still had a roommate and were making more as a part-time waiter than you had made the year you decided to be a full-time actor (as they knew had happened to Kevin)? Was it when you got fat, or bald, or got bad plastic surgery that couldn’t disguise the fact that you were fat and bald? When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Behind her warm facade radiating empathy and understanding, there was an aggressive, bad- tempered bitch, putting up endless walls of goodness to conceal her rage and resentment toward the entire world. She was like an alligator in a velvet jumpsuit.”
― Zygmunt Miłoszewski, Rage

“never
trust anyone
who says
they do not see color.
this means
to them,
you are invisible.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace