Katie > Katie's Quotes

“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“Everyone loves something, even if it's only tortillas.”
― Chogyam Trungpa

“I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream!”
― Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 01

“The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.”
― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [Paperback]

“I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“You know how when something really touches you, it feels like burning, a burning inside.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“It would seem that mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments.”
― Franz Boas

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928