Erica > Erica 's Quotes

“Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn't, or loves less, or loves someone else. Or someone is a good soul and someone a villain. And there are just these episodes, anecdotes, places, pauses, hailings of cabs, overcomings of obstacles, or instances of being overcome by them, illnesses, accidents, recoveries, wars, desires, welcomings, rebuffs, baskings (rare, not so long), pinings (more frequent, perhaps, and longer), actions, failures to act, hesitations, proliferations, endings of the line, until there is death. Well, no. I have a wonderful, fond memory, about love and trust and books.”
― Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

“Without the threat of punishment, there is no joy in flight.”
― Kōbō Abe

“My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“It's amazing how right you can be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“I wonder if you know at all what is happening in my heart, what a word. I suppose you don't. You've so many females, wife, sister, daughters, cousins, dog, in your life that you've probably confused me with them all.”
― Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

“My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. ”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Men were looking at her, but with neither sympathy nor antipathy. Nor even with curiosity, she thought. They had the absorbed and vacant expression of the man who looks into his handkerchief after blowing his nose.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Before her eyes was the violent blue sky— nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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

“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“Do you know I don't know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it's only that I'm not able to express it...And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God's sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Trustful people are the pure at heart, as they are moved by the zeal of their own trustworthiness.”
― Criss Jami, Healology