Val > Val's Quotes

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“walk forwards in the radiance of the past”
― Francesco Petrarca

“When the curtain falls no one is ready”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

“How can poetry be something we study, but also something that makes us cry?”
― Rhian Williams

“Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst”
― Shakespeare, William

“still loved but deprived of grace”
― Flann O'Brien

“No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“The fractured self is not something that needs to be rectified fixed and made whole; by freeing thought of the blinkers of representation, the space of fracture, of multiplicity (as opposed to unity) becomes a powerful place and one from which the most radical ideas can emerge.”
― Ria Banerjee

“For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.

Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Selected Letters

“Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.”
― D. H. Lawrence

“Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Man has made such a mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth, without even yet succeeding.”
― D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Works

“our bodies surround what has always been there”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If one could only teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen society would be quite civilized.”
― Oscar wilde

“Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.”
― D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board”
― D.H. Lawrence

“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death”
― D.H. Lawrence

“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.”
― DH Lawrence

“I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don't know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Man Who Loved Islands / L'uomo che amava le isole

“Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.”
― Lemony Snicket

“The sad truth is the truth is sad.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Hostile Hospital

“We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior [to men] and always have been.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“I've found that there is always some beauty left -- in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
― Louis L'Amour, Matagorda/The First Fast Draw: Two Novels in One Volume

“... and everyone knows you are not a real player until you secretly prefer losing.”
― Lawrence Osborne