Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn't take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.

Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it's not -- it's luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“It is very frustrating not to be understood in this world. If you say one thing and keep being told that you mean something else, it can make you want to scream. But somewhere in the world there is a place for all of us, whether you are an electric form of decoration, peppermint-scented sweet, a source of timber, or a potato pancake.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story

“Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.”
― Michelle Tea, Rose of No Man's Land

“If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.”
― Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

“Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Straight people are the most pathetic of all. I’ve never seen such a miserable group of people in my life. They don’t know anything about themselves”
― Sarah Schulman, Rat Bohemia

“They looked at each other for a while their gazes steady, unblinking. It was the way people stare at each other not when they're in love but afterward, when they finally realize all the many horrible and beautiful things locked up within that love.”
― Brock Clarke, Carrying the Torch

“Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

“I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“The women say that they could not eat hare veal or fowl, they say that they could not eat animals, but man, yes, they may. He says to them throwing his head back with pride, poor wretches of women, if you eat him who will go to work in the fields, who will produce food consumer goods, who will make the aeroplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will govern? Then the women laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent.”
― Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

“We no longer have political movement. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals - fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers - are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion. In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this.”
― Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

“Whatever Americans fondly believe, their government has always had its fingers in the economic pie. What distinguishes the USA from every other developed country has been the widespread belief to the contrary.”
― Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

“Familiarity reduces insecurity, so we feel more comfortable describing and combating the risks we think we understand: terrorists, immigrants, job loss or crime. But the true sources of insecurity in decades to come will be those that most of us cannot define: dramatic climate change and its social and environmental effects; imperial decline and its attendant 'small wars'; collective political impotence in the face of distant upheavals with disruptive local impact. These are the threats that chauvinist politicians will be best placed to exploit, precisely because they lead so readily to anger and humiliation.”
― Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

“It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its passage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there's nothing.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“(Later, Giddle's response when I told her I was in love: "Oh God, I'm so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it's so disappointing. But good luck with that.")”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made made curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.
I am Raskalnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita.
I am you.
If you read these pages and think I'm the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can't feel my pain. If you believe you're not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you're unable to empathize.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“I thought every person should live for art, not just me, and furthermore, why would I want to be normal? Why would I want to be stupid like everyone else?”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul.

Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?

You think art has meaning. You think you're not like me.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“There's so much beauty in this world that it's hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live - if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I'm just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Nat:

I don't know. The weight of it, I guess. At some point it becomes bearable. It turns into something you can crawl out from under. And carry around--like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: "Oh right. That." Which can be awful. But not all the time. Sometime's it kinda ... Not that you like it exactly, but it's what you have instead of your son, so you don't wanna let go of it either. So you carry it around. And it doesn't go away, which is ...

Becca:

What?

Nat:

Fine ... actually.”
― David Lindsay-Abaire, Rabbit Hole

“A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia