Isha > Isha's Quotes

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.”
― Novalis, Fragmente und Studien. Die Christenheit oder Europa

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“...maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“We have an obligation to Read For Pleasure. If others see us reading, we show that reading is A Good Thing." "It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones.”
― Neil Gaiman, Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings --- the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [...] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“In other words, it is not in craving after ready-made, complete and finished things that love finds its meaning ― but in the urge to participate in the becoming of such things. Love is akin to transcendence; it is but another name for creative drive and as such is fraught with risks, as all creation is never sure where it is going to end.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds

“When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.”
― Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know

“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
― Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass / My Bondage and My Freedom / Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

“When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily..”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Things just happen and we have to accept them. Happiness and sadness are for people who can control what happens to them.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

“To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.”
― Judith Halberstam

“...we need to think about sex and gender in a more ecological kind of framework, understanding that changes in one environment inevitably impact changes in other environments. Gender here might be thought of more as a climate or ecosystem and less as an identity or discrete bodily location.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

“In a crisis, do not remain calm, do not look for the nearest exit, do not stick your head in the sand; do agitate, do make things worse, do run screaming through the street, and do refuse to return to business as usual. Business as usual is what created this mess in the first place. Business as usual has meant that businesspeople and corporate fat cats run/ruin the world and artists are out of luck; it has meant that education, spirituality, sexuality all must function on a business model and every attempt to make changes is greeted with a pragmatic question about whether changing things will also mean making money. Making money cannot be the goal of the new feminism. Putting women in positions of power is not what gaga feminism wants. What gaga feminism wants cannot be easily summarized, but it is not an independent bank account, not a profitable nonprofit; mama does not want a brand new bag. Mama wants revolution.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

“It's startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.”
― Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

“Culture shapes the scripts that expressions of distress will follow.”
― rachel aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

“There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's taste exceeds one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Not for you,” Lila replies ardently, “you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend