Ann > Ann's Quotes

“Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, once asked a group of women at a university why they felt threatened by men. The women said they were afraid of being beaten, raped, or killed by men. She then asked a group of men why they felt threatened by women. They said they were afraid women would laugh at them.”
― Molly Ivins, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?

“Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave him the kiss she owed him.

What big teeth you have!

She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest's Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even as he answered: All the better to eat you with.

The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat.”
― Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Let me rage before I die.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Nietzsche

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Some of us walk around with a necklace of hope, an armour of sanity, but at the end of the day, they always come off. We reveal our naked, vulnerable, real selves.”
― Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading 2

“It's the end of the world every day, for someone.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“There are far too many silent sufferers.  Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, & Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“It wasn't that she was sad—sadness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, she felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only thing she felt was numb. And tired. Yes, she very frequently felt tired.”
― Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape

“You can break a man with hope.”
― Kate Morgenroth, Jude

“I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”
― ram dass

“Seriousness is for fools and poor destitute families who have lived their entire lives on spam.”
― Jason Krumbine, Just Dial 911 for Assistance

“Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war; and this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.”
― Aristophanes, Birds

“It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

“I hope that the day never comes that I will need to flee my country in pursuit of safety or a better life. I pray that if I do, it’s not as a result of violence and that we don’t have to leave our lives behind us with nothing but a bag and any remaining family members by our side. If circumstances ever forced us to flee, I hope we are not called animals and treated as subhuman criminals simply because we want to live. Should it be so dire that we are forced to separate from our children with the hope they would find a better, safer life- if it were so very bad that I would rather they leave me, go on their own in a new country with nothing but faith and hope in their pocket, I hope the world will care for my priceless children and not discard them- simply let them fall through the cracks.”
― Elizabeth Tambascio

“Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink of a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opned our mouths and they heard the accent?

The truth is, we had no simple answers. Being rattled around in freight trains, open trucks, and ratty ocean-liners, we ended up being a puzzle even to ourselves. At first, that was hard to take; then we got used to the idea. We began to savor it, to enjoy it. Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.”
― Charles Simic, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

“Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows. [...] What has been done in my country I did not want, did not ask for it; white people going through my country. [...] When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him. [...] I have two mountains in that country--the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountain. I want the Great Father to make no roads through them.”
― Red Cloud

“If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.”
― Ten Bears Comanche Nation

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life