k > k's Quotes

“Never forget:
we walk on hell,
gazing at flowers.”
― Kobayashi Issa

“Sections in the bookstore

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.”
― Marquis de Sade

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
― John Lennon

“The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, impudent ones to feed them.”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.”
― Georges Bataille

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
― Georges Bataille, Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).”
― Georges Bataille, The Impossible: A Story of Rats followed by Dianus and by The Oresteia

“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.”
― Natsume Soseki, Kokoro

“I do not want your admiration now, because I do not want your insults in the future. I bear with my loneliness now, in order to avoid greater loneliness in the years ahead. You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro

“If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.”
― Bell Hooks

“...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”
― Joan Crawford

“Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it”
― John Lennon

“Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.”
― Clarice Lispector

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life.

Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“You should enjoy the little detours to the fullest. Because that's where you'll find the things more important than what you want.”
― Yoshihiro Togashi, Hunter x Hunter, Vol. 32

“When I say it doesn't hurt me, that means I can bear it.”
― Yoshihiro Togashi