James > James's Quotes

“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Remember tonight... for it is the beginning of always”
― Dante

“As little flowers, which the chill of night has bent and huddled, when the white sun strikes, grow straight and open fully on their stems, so did I, too, with my exhausted force.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“If dirty words frighten you...I really don’t know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
― T.S. Eliot

“After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?”
― Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

- Bad Blood”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell