λee > λee's Quotes

“And don't worry about your lineage
poetic or natural.”
― Frank O'Hara

“That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.”
― Frank O'Hara

“I should love a dear little blind rat,’ said Wendy, and added in a contemplative voice: ‘I sometimes wish I were blind you know, so that I needn’t see my tooth water after I’ve spat it.”
― Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
― Joan Didion

“Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“Sometimes I wonder if I met everyone in my life in the wrong order.”
― Belle de Jour, The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl

“I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had no meaning.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.)”
― Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Silent World

“[On Virginia Woolf] Craving to be set free from her egomania by something or someone stronger and altogether dissimilar from herself, she speculated endlessly upon the unknown: and for her the unknown was frequently the commonplace.”
― Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsbury group: his work, their influence

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier;
I have seen worse sights than this.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim. (Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.)”
― Ovid

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“It was not chance that brought us together again. I am sure of that. These things are predestined. I have a theory that each man's life is like a pack of cards, and those we meet and sometimes love are shuffled with us. We find ourselves in the same suit, held by the hand of Fate. The game is played, we are discarded, and pass on.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Mount Verità

“I saw something nasty in the woodshed.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“A fish kept in a glass of water will live forever”
― Samuel Pepys

“— Square go then smart cunt!”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
― E.M. Forster

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“Let the gods speak softly of us”
― Ezra Pound, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound