Mel > Mel's Quotes

“However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“I'd been so tired of 'strong female characters' for so long by then. I was so tired of the way female strength was made to look cold and humorless; the way it was characterized as deviant and 'unnatural' and always lonely and exceptional. I was tired of the grim undertone of tragedy that lurked under its surface. 'Strong female characters' were never funny, and they never had any fun, either. More often than not, they were celibate, friendless, and clinically depressed. Their monomaniacal devotion to crime fighting made them lean, cranky, and impatient. Naturally, they had axes to grind: they were avenging brides, poker-faced assassins, gloomy ninjas with commitment issues. Who were these characters? What were they trying to tell us? Why didn't they ever say goodbye before hanging up the phone? And why were they always being reborn or remade as killing machines after losing everything they held dear?

...I don't want to see another symbolic woman start all over again. I want to see the symbolic world change to acknowledge her existence. I don't want to see a young girl get a makeover or go shopping with her boyfriend's credit card. I want to watch her blow up the Death Star - metaphorically, of course.”
― Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages

“Alice's predicament in Wonderland is a familiar one to modern women: She's a post-Enlightenment girl in a persistently feudal world. She perceives herself as a subject with inalienable rights, but she's perceived, variously, as an interloper, a servant, a threat, an object, a bother, a girl. Alice believes this can be remedied with information. She believes that if she explains and assets herself, if she reasonably points out the facts, then she will shift the perception. At the very least, she thinks, she can learn the rules and fit in. So, she tries. She takes others' good faith for granted. She makes her case again and again. She tries to learn their rules. But she is eternally frustrated, because Wonderland is governed not by reason or rules but by ideology, faith, superstition, and fear. Something is real if you believe it's real, if you continually affirm its existence. It disappears if you don't, subsumed into a parallel universe.”
― Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages

“Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

“Perhaps the most corrosive aspect of a lonely life is not the time spent alone, but the time spent in a crowd, feeling left out.”
― Emilie Pine, Notes To Self

“But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn’t there.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“How nice, then, to go to Waterstones and not to have to disinfect yourself when you get home; yet sometimes as a reader I feel nostalgic for disorder, for the random and unpredictable. I find myself wanting to be free from categorization, or to introduce another kind; I wish bookshops had a shelf called Really Interesting Books. We all know what a RIB is, I think. It's a book that is about more than you imagined when first you picked it up. RIBs are like treasure maps—the marks on the paper are only symbolic indications of the riches to be recovered. They tell you things you always somehow knew, but had never been able to articulate. A RIB is like going on your travels, but also somehow like arriving home.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing

“The heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is: the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings. But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog.”
― Lyz Lenz, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]”
― Jim Jarmusch

“Where did the moor start? That's a highly debatable question. Where does the true north start? Where do moths end and butterflies begin? Where is the border between 'sometimes fancies members of the opposite sex but doesn't actually want to touch their sexual organs' and 'is definitely gay'? Who decides what's soulful funk and what's funky soul? There's always some hard-bitten unimpressable bastard who'll tell you, when you're on the moor, that you're not on the proper moor, no matter how far into the moor you are. But let's not piss about. This - whether or not it's 'technically' on the moor, as the map defines it - is a moorland village. You know, very firmly when you're in it, that you're not in London, or Kettering, or Ipswich. You're in Underhill. As you pass from the high ground down that funnel, so exquisitely depicted by Joyce, the air of the uplands remains in your nostrils, the trees have beards, the lanes have ferny green sideburns, and your hair is made of rain. It's the bloody moor, you pedantic bastards.”
― Tom Cox

“It's a boozy night, and the regulars are practically dry-humping the bar.”
― Stacey Richter, MY DATE WITH SATAN: Stories

“The young will always to some extent view ageing as a matter of taste, as if the fact you do not appear to be young any more is a decision you’ve made, like selecting a certain type of carpet or paint for your house.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”
― John Hodgman, More Information Than You Require

“There will be moments when you have to be a grown-up. Those moments are tricks. Do not fall for them.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“You don’t have to go to some special private school to be an artist. Just look at the intricate beauty of cobwebs. Spiders make them with their butts.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“You're broke, eh?"
I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“The main hallway looked just the same. The portrait over the mantel had the same hot black eyes and the knight in the stained-glass window still wasn’t getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought. The most moving moments of our lives find us without words. What can be explained with words is only the waves, the foam on the surface, but music has its place underneath the waves, in the silent depth of the unspeakable”
― Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorized Autobiography

“If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.”
― James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love--whether we call it friendship or family or romance--is the work of mirroring each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when shame and sorrow occlude our own light from view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
― James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

“We are ugly but we have the music.”
― Leonard Cohen