Profanityprayers > Profanityprayers's Quotes

Showing 1-25 of 25
sort by

  • #1
    David Foster Wallace
    “If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
    David Foster Wallace, Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

  • #2
    David Foster Wallace
    “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
    David Foster Wallace

  • #3
    David Foster Wallace
    “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

  • #4
    David Foster Wallace
    “Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.”
    David Foster Wallace

  • #5
    David Foster Wallace
    “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
    David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

  • #6
    David Foster Wallace
    “You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. ”
    David Foster Wallace

  • #7
    David Foster Wallace
    “Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.”
    David Foster Wallace

  • #8
    David Foster Wallace
    “What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
    David Foster Wallace

  • #9
    Jonathan Safran Foer
    “I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”
    Jonathan Safran Foer

  • #10
    Haruki Murakami
    “If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.”
    Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

  • #11
    Haruki Murakami
    “In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.”
    Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

  • #12
    David Foster Wallace
    “The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.”
    David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  • #13
    David Foster Wallace
    “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”
    David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  • #14
    David Foster Wallace
    “And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.”
    David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

  • #15
    David Foster Wallace
    “Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”
    David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

  • #16
    David Foster Wallace
    “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”
    David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

  • #17
    Warsan Shire
    “My alone feels so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude.”
    Warsan Shire

  • #18
    Warsan Shire
    “you are a horse running alone
    and he tries to tame you
    compares you to an impossible highway
    to a burning house
    says you are blinding him
    that he could never leave you
    forget you
    want anything but you
    you dizzy him, you are unbearable
    every woman before or after you
    is doused in your name
    you fill his mouth
    his teeth ache with memory of taste
    his body just a long shadow seeking yours
    but you are always too intense
    frightening in the way you want him
    unashamed and sacrificial
    he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
    lives in your head
    and you tried to change didn't you?
    closed your mouth more
    tried to be softer
    prettier
    less volatile, less awake
    but even when sleeping you could feel
    him travelling away from you in his dreams
    so what did you want to do love
    split his head open?
    you can't make homes out of human beings
    someone should have already told you that
    and if he wants to leave
    then let him leave
    you are terrifying
    and strange and beautiful
    something not everyone knows how to love.”
    Warsan Shire

  • #19
    Warsan Shire
    “two people who were once very close can
    without blame
    or grand betrayal
    become strangers.
    perhaps this is the saddest thing in the world.”
    Warsan Shire

  • #20
    Warsan Shire
    “every mouth you’ve ever kissed
    was just practice
    all the bodies you’ve ever undressed
    and ploughed in to
    were preparing you for me.
    i don’t mind tasting them in the
    memory of your mouth
    they were a long hall way
    a door half open
    a single suit case still on the conveyor belt
    was it a long journey?
    did it take you long to find me?
    you’re here now,
    welcome home.”
    Warsan Shire

  • #21
    Warsan Shire
    “how far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?
    how often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short?
    why do you find the unavailable so alluring?
    where did it begin? what went wrong? and who made you feel so worthless?
    if they wanted you, wouldn’t they have chosen you?
    all this time, you were begging for love silently, thinking they couldn’t hear you, but they smelt it on you, you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin?
    and what about the others that would do anything for you, why did you make them love you until you could not stand it?
    how are you both of these women, both flighty and needful?
    where did you learn this, to want what does not want you?
    where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?”
    Warsan Shire

  • #22
    Warsan Shire
    “I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are
    still together.”
    Warsan Shire

  • #23
    Warsan Shire
    “later that night
    i held an atlas in my lap
    ran my fingers across the whole world
    and whispered
    where does it hurt?

    it answered
    everywhere
    everywhere
    everywhere.”
    Warsan Shire

  • #24
    Charles Simic
    “If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”
    Charles Simic

  • #25
    Louise Glück
    “At first I saw you everywhere.
    Now only in certain things,
    at longer intervals.”
    Louise Glück



Rss