Madeleine > Madeleine's Quotes

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
― W.H. Auden, New Year Letter

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.”
― William S. Burroughs

“If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you'll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ”
― William S. Burroughs

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

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.”
― Marguerite Duras, Practicalities

“Don’t be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.”
― Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover