Alexander > Alexander's Quotes

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.”
― Marcel Proust

“I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone put the dry, stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Así es el tiempo, el tiempo desnudo; viene lentamente a la existencia, se hace esperar y cuando llega uno siente asco porque cae en al cuenta de que hacía mucho que estaba ahí.”
― Jean Paul Sartre

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.”
― Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli

“a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“To readers who tend to think primarily in terms of liking or disliking characters: these people are fictional. They do not stand before us asking to be liked. They stand before us asking to be read. They ask to be seen and heard and maybe even understood, or at least for their motives to be understood, if that is what the author is after. But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend these characters are in fact real, that they are human beings standing before us. Let us open up at least a little to those we might not like—in their presence, we might experience something new. To me, facing those we might not want to face is crucial to living in a diverse world.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Best American Short Stories 2015

“There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
― Stephen King

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?”
― Mo Yan, Red Sorghum

“... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“... it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Haber nacido me ha estropeado la salud.”
― Clarice Lispector

“I had loaded another weight onto his suffering and it hurt me to understand that while one person can never really share the pain of another, they can so easily and so heedlessly add to it.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Gift of Rain

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus