Chloe > Chloe's Quotes

“I did not ask. Later I felt bad about this. I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.

I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish, and I the fulfilment,
You are the night, and I the day.
What else? It is perfect enough.
It is perfectly complete.
You and I,
What more—?
Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!”
― D.H. Lawrence, Look! We Have Come Through!

“My arrogance knows no bounds
And I will make no peace today
And you shall be so lucky
To find a woman like me


Today neither will the East claim me
nor the West admit me
Today my belly is a well
wherein serpents are coiled
ready to poison the world,
and you should be so lucky.


All I have is my arrogance
I will teach it to lean back
and smoke a cigarette in your faces,
and you should be so lucky


No I will make no peace
even though my hands are empty
I will talk as big as I please
I will be all or nothing
And I will jump before the heavy trucks
And I will saw off my leg at the thigh
before I bend one womanly knee


I am poison
And you will drink me
And you should be so lucky.”
― Mohja Kahf

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”
― Marcel Proust