jennifer > jennifer's Quotes

“It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.”
― Saul Bellow

“I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.”
― Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.”
― Stanley Milgram

“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity”
― David Foster Wallace

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“If you don't build your dream someone else will hire you to help build theirs.”
― Tony Gaskins

“I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls