Justine > Justine's Quotes

“She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. ”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“I hope for nothing
I want for nothing
I fear nothing
I am free.”
― Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that he exists." Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED"
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Sometimes, in India, you have to surrender before you win.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“The ancient Sanskrit legends speak of a destined love, a karmic connection between souls that are fated to meet and collide and enrapture one another. The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she's loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings - the wings that only we can see - and because wanting her kills every other desire of love.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“In the beginning we feared everything—animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky—everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No-one knows why anyone does anything. No-one tells the truth. No-one is happy. No-one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate. And now you have it.’ He”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“The same legends also carry warnings that such fated love may, sometimes, be the possession and the obsession of one, and only one, of the two souls twinned by destiny. But wisdom, in one sense, is the opposite of love. Love survives in us precisely because it isn’t wise.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.”
― Stephen King, It

“Maybe, in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.”
― Stephen King, It

“I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.”
― Stephen King, It

“Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists. S.K.”
― Stephen King, It

“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being an adult is about learning how to die.”
― Stephen King, It

“I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life...It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think...it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in SPITE of the pain.”
― Stephen King, It

“Maybe this isn't home, nor ever was- maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.”
― Stephen King, It

“Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray