Vera > Vera's Quotes

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray that one day, you will spin around at the water’s edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Ignite, my love. Ignite.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What do you do from morning to night?"

"I endure myself.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“they weren’t attracted to each other, they’d known it even before going to bed together, but they still wanted to try, because they were alone”
― Mariana Enríquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Over and over, we begin again.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“She was a non-active member of the Order of the Eternal Flame and did not fight.”
― SenLinYu, Alchemised

“Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed. “I suppose you do.”
― SenLinYu, Alchemised

“Sometimes she wished she’d died in the hospital with her father, to be remembered and mourned for her possibilities, rather than live day by day growing ever lesser. Now it didn’t matter if she’d been an alchemist, or a healer, or anything else. To anyone who ever learned of it, she would only be that one thing. Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.”
― SenLinYu, Alchemised

“…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“The one charm of the past is that it is the past.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty hat one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself”
― Oscar Wilde , The Picture of Dorian Gray (Collector's Edition): Including the Uncensored 13 Chapter Version & The Revised 20 Chapter Version