Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances.”
― Geoff Dyer

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.”
― Amy Hempel

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
― Annie Dillard

“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.”
― Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

“To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.”
― Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

“Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.”
― Steven Wright