Sezin Koehler > Sezin's Quotes

“For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.”
― Man Ray

“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”
― Man Ray

“Once again...welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“•Zuzu Bailey: Look, Daddy. Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.
•George Bailey: That's right, that's right.
•George Bailey: Attaboy, Clarence.”
― It's a Wonderful Life

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“America is my country, and Paris is my home town.”
― Gertrude Stein

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”
― Diane Arbus

“This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.”
― Guillermo Del Toro, The Monsters Of Hellboy II

“To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and the novelists — can be trusted to do
it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage. To make our meaning plain — Orlando could come home from one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of
times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself to get into bed, and there
she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing.
Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr M. amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take
away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.
Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“But Orlando was a woman — Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window — all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas,— a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love — as the male novelists define it — and who, after all, speak with greater authority?— has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and — But we all know what love is. Did Orlando do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of one’s biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.”
― Colson Whitehead

“I think you have to know who you are. Get to know the monster that lives in your soul. Dive deep into your soul and explore it. I don’t want to renounce my dark side. The truth has always held an enormous interest for me.”
― Tori Amos

“When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Life always has an unhappy ending, but you can have a lot of fun along the way, and everything doesn't have to be dripping in deep significance.”
― Roger Ebert

“Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.”
― Henry James, The art of fiction

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.”
― Henry James

“There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go--if there are no doors or windows--he walks through a wall.”
― Bernard Malamud

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself."

(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)”
― Bernard Malamud

“We have two lives; the life we learn with and the life we live after that.”
― Bernard Malamud, The Natural

“A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.”
― Maya Angelou

“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
― Raymond Carver