Tara June Winch > Tara's Quotes

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
― Immanuel Kant

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
― James Baldwin

“Give the children love, more love and still more love – and the common sense will come by itself.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.”
― Victor Hugo, The Memoirs of Victor Hugo

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
― Emmanuel Kant

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry

“Gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.... True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care--with no one there to see or cheer.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
― Michel Foucault

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace , This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations