Maya > Maya's Quotes

“And never have I felt so deeply
at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.”
― Albert Camus

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. ”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There's only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and forget everybody else! It sounds egotistical, but it's actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“-You know I've always wanted to break the molds which life forms around one if one lets them.
-Why?
-I want to trespass boundaries, erase all identifications, anything which fixes one permanently into one mold, one place, without hope of change.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“MEDVIEDENKO
Why do you always wear mourning?

MASHA
I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“It remained inaccessible to my mind, even though my heart unconsciously became increasingly suffused with it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“I am interested only in "nonsense"; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.”
― Daniil Kharms

“It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text