CASSANDRA > CASSANDRA's Quotes

“All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Here I am
leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome
burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
my silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”
― Richard Siken

“Hope was based on the unknown, and I liked knowing things. Like that I was going to fail. Failure had better odds. ”
― Nami Mun, Miles from Nowhere

“There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western,
Henry. It’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard
out of the bone white afternoon.
It’s another wrong-man-dies scenario, and we keep doing it Henry,
keep saying until we get it right … but we always win and we never quit.
See, we’ve won again,
here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say Please,
for just one night, will you lie down next to me, we can leave our clothes on,
we can stay all buttoned up …
But we both know how it goes—I say I want you inside me and you hold
my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open
with a knife.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“Love's merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.”
― Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems

“Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.”
― Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other's wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.”
― Kobo Abe

“Love is like falconry," he said. "Don't you think that's true, Cleveland?"
"Never say love is like anything." said Cleveland. "It isn't.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve--then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.”
― Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

“I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

“The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

“I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook