Laurene > Laurene's Quotes

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”
― Frank O'Hara

“It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more
adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac”
― Frank O'Hara

“That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.”
― Frank O'Hara

“Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better”
― Roberto Bolaño, Amulet

“we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
― Joan Didion

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
― Joan Didion

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments