Lea > Lea's Quotes

“Tonight I can write the saddest lines
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, El Principito

“We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Volume 1

“That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I will You, in all, Myself, with promise to never desert you,
To which I sign my name.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“He always accuses me of trying to look'cool', I was like, 'everybody tries to look cool, I just happen to be successful.”
― Daniel Clowes, Ghost World

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Better to have been a dickhead and seen it,
than be a cunt all your life and not know it.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem, but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Our willingness to believe the news is, in many cases, not entirely innocent.”
― Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land

“Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse

“But strangely, I am all right. The world I belong to now is the one in the books I read. When I am awake, I am reading.”
― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she's a total freak. The kid's beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you're worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you... You don't know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin