Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“There had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“Being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can’t help but respond to that state.”
― Carmen Maria Machado

“[Magic Realism] is a form that enables me to experiment and be fearless”
― Irenosen Okojie

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”
― Angela Carter

“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”
― Angela Carter

“Most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode.”
― Angela Carter

“Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“To you who eat a lot of rice because you’re lonely,
To you who sleep a lot because you’re bored,
To you who cry a lot because you are sad, I write this down.

Chew on your feelings that are cornerned like you would chew on rice.
Anyway, life is something that you need to digest.”
― Chun Yang Hee

“The stale cerebral self-conscious wit that bubbled like a frothy mold in every corner of Cambridge”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“There is nobody that can make you happy, you must take care of this matter yourself.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning. ”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“We are all footnotes, many of us will never have the chance to be read, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote, to remain on the surface before, in spite of our efforts, we are submerged. Everywhere we leave constant traces of our existence, of our struggle against vacuity. And the greater the vacuity, the more violent our struggle.”
― Dubravka Ugrešić, Lisica

“Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, rather they are irregular in their incidence. Thus there may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes a plentiful crop of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly upon the earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature, meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, and sea serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysms beset humanity.”
― David Garnett, Lady into Fox

“Old age ain't no place for sissies.”
― Bette Davis

“I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I...I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”
― Angela Carter

“The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
― Terry Pratchett

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.
If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Once you’ve got to the end, and you know what happens, it’s your job to make it look like you knew exactly what you were doing all along”
― Neil Gaiman

“You always have to remember, when people tell you that something doesn’t work for them, that they’re right. It doesn’t work for them. And that is incredibly important information. You also have to remember that when people tell you what they think is wrong and how you should fix it, that they’re almost always wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman

“There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.”
― Haruki Murakami

“When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.”
― Haruki Murakami

“It is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in every way they can imagine—without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.”
― Haruki Murakami