Efemia > Efemia's Quotes

“In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.”
― Elena Ferrante

“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”
― Martin Amis, The Information

“Being photographed was dead time for the soul. Can the head think, while it does the same half smile under the same light frown? If this was all true, then Richard's soul was in great shape. No one photographed him any more, not even his wife. When the photographs came back from an increasingly infrequent holiday. Richard was never there..an elbow or earlobe on the edge of the frame, on the edge of life and love..”
― Martin Amis , The Information

“What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty?”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“The loneliness of difference, the loneliness of undesirability, the loneliness of not being admitted into the magic circles of connection and acceptance – the social and professional groupings, the embracing arms.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it? That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood.”
― Olivia Laing

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.”
― James Baldwin

“When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.”
― Sylvia Plath

“To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“There was no starting point for the rebellion, but I could mark an arbitrary one: that a grown-up was someone who, first and foremost, could drink a Coke at whim.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“Between Sylvia and me there existed as between my own mother and me - a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy (words from Aurelia Plath from the Introduction)”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“...Life happens so hard and fast I sometimes wonder who is me...”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“Writing sharpens life; life enriches writing.”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“He was blind to self-constraints, like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri

“Moulmein for food,
Mandalay for conversation,
Rangoon for ostentation”
― Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear

“I hope for my poetry to be empirical.
It shall suggest making love:
you will want the usual
in an unusual way.”
― Thabo Jijana, Failing Maths and My Other Crimes

“now,
never mind
the boy who came out of that reading room
a new man,
safe in the hope of what was to come
in the summers of his life.”
― Thabo Jijana, Failing Maths and My Other Crimes

“We are all orbits of some sort,
circling around the world we call our own,
and literature...
Literature is a compass;”
― Thabo Jijana, Failing Maths and My Other Crimes