Maggie > Maggie's Quotes

“I am not afraid... I was born to do this.”
― Joan of Arc

“Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim. (Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.)”
― Ovid

“She has worn herself away by constant sharpening. She is all edge.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“There is no other way, and there never was.”
― Charles Bukowski, On Writing

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
― Audre Lorde

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
― Matthew 25:40

“If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.”
― John 15:18

“I was sayin' let me out of here before I was even born.”
― Richard Hell

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.”
― Albert Camus

“I do it so it feels like hell.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster.”
― Norman Mailer, The White Negro

“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., A Man Without a Country

“And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.”
― Aleksander Pushkin

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end.”
― Ken Kesey

“I am an outcast from human society; my name is execrated by all who understand its entire import--by those very beings whose happiness I ardently desire.”
― Mary Shelley

“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“It is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.”
― Murray Bookchin, Ecology and Revolutionary Thought

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“Just being away from people is one of the most marvelous fulfillments a man like me can have. The absence of humanity is a fulfillment so graceful that even God would understand if he created them. Which he probably didn’t.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I love being alone. It's not solitary at all. I want to be solitary. It's great. The best thing in the world is to get away from other people. It's glorious.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves