Heather > Heather's Quotes

“And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me--be it a watery grave in Ireland's only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its grayer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.”
― Kevin Barry

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice

“Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.”
― Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

“No matter how silly you feel or uncool you look, no matter how small that voice inside you is, that voice telling you something isn’t right: listen to it.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.: A Memoir

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
― Oliver Sacks

“I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.”
― Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit

“In the native way he was tormented now by his own happiness.”
― Kevin Barry, That Old Country Music

“I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes. I am
under their lids, growing black.”
― Bill Knott