Let > Let's Quotes

“As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“But I can't. Need is not quite belief.”
― Anne Sexton

“Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.”
― Jacques Lacan

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, L'estrany cas del Dr. Jekyll i Mr. Hyde

“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“someone will remember us
I say
even in another time”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.”
― Anne Carson

“Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.”
― Anne Sexton

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“I like you; your eyes are full of language."

[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]”
― Anne Sexton

“Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.”
― Anne Sexton

“I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.”
― Anne Sexton

“The joy that isn't shared dies young.”
― Anne Sexton

“Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.”
― Anne Sexton

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.”
― Jenny Diski

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.”
― Zoe Leonard