eve > eve's Quotes

“In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Les bêtes sont ce que l'homme a le plus méconnu et le plus opprimé”
― Léon Bloy, The Woman Who Was Poor

“Une minute vient de s’écouler. Cela fait environ cent morts et cent nouveau-nés de plus. Une centaine de vagissements et une centaine de derniers soupirs. Le calcul est fait depuis longtemps. Le compte est exact. C’est la balance du grouillement de l’humanité. Dans une heure, il y aura six mille cadavres sous votre lit et six mille petits enfants, tout autour de vous, pleureront par lierre ou dans des berceaux.”
― Léon Bloy, The Woman Who Was Poor

“You told me once you forget you are a woman, and I understand it now – you think to be a woman is to be weak – you think ours is a sisterhood of suffering! Perhaps so, but doesn’t it take greater strength to walk a mile in pain than seven miles in none? You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.”
― Sarah Perry

“Cora, you cannot always keep yourself away from things that hurt you. We all wish we could, but we cannot: to live at all is to be bruised.”
― Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

“Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world”
― Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

“CLEAVE. To cleave to something is to cling to it with all your heart, he said, but to cleave something apart is to break it up.”
― Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

“I have been to many religious services over the years. Each one I go to only reinforces my general impression that religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it's just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity.
It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion--whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.

I know how wrong this is.

When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology.

It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Are you a vegetarian?' I ask, based on the evidence in front of me.
She nods.
'Why?'
'Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we've eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you're a carnivore and you add up all the animals you've eaten--well, that's a long time in purgatory, being chewed.'
'Really?'
She laughs. 'No. I'm just sick of the question. I mean, I'm a vegetarian because I think it's wrong to eat other sentient creatures. And it sucks for the environment.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Listen to many, speak to a few.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean, a small German hare.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

“Les esprits théologiques voient une incompatibilité entre le réalisme et la morale, car ils considèrent les phénomènes de la nature comme des manifestations du diable. Contrairement à eux les grands génies dramatiques Sophocle, Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, Hugo admirent et reproduisent la nature dans toute son intégrité avec ses ténèbres et sa lumière. Dans leurs œuvres qui reflète l’existence humaine la laideur devient de la beauté lorsqu’elle passe par la souffrance.”
― Vera Starkov, Le Petit verre. Comédie sociale en un acte

“Nous croyons être les premiers à ressentir certains troubles, ne sachant pas que l'amour est comme la poésie, et que tous les amants, même les plus médiocres, s'imaginent qu'ils innovent.”
― Raymond Radiguet

“I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.”
― Nicole Krauss, Great House

“A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal. ('The Universal and the Particular')" ... In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal, she overturns the concepts to which we are accustomed. For up to this point, minority writers had to add "the universal" to their points of view if they wished to attain the unquestioned universality of the dominant class. Gay men, for example, have always defined themselves as a minority and never questioned, despite their transgression, the dominant choice. This is why gay culture has always had a fairly wide audience.
[From the Foreword "Changing the Point of View" by Louise Turcotte]”
― Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind: And Other Essays

“Scholars do one of two things when they discover information that doesn't fit what they already know. Either they sweep it aside so it doesn't bring their cherished theories into question or they focus on it with laserlike intensity and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.”
― Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

“The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation...
...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“I love, I can only love the one I've left behind, stained with my blood when, ungrateful wretch that I am, I extinguished myself and shot myself through the heart. But never, never have I ceased to love that one, and even on the night I parted from him I loved him perhaps more poignantly than ever. We can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love. I want and thirst this very minute to kiss , with tears streaming down my cheeks, this one and only I have left behind. I don't want and won't accept any other.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

“Baignée toute d'azur et d'or
À la main une fleur de pays étrangers,
Te voici, sourire radieux,
Un signe de tête et tu disparais dans le
Brouillard.”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, Trois rencontres

“Ce qui est, ce qui était, ce qui vient de tout temps —
Ton regard impassible a tout embrassé...”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, Trois rencontres

“Vladimir Soloviev
Est couché ici.
A été philosophe,
Squelette aujourd'hui.
Aimable pour certains,
Pour beaucoup ennemi ;
Il aima sans esprit,
S'est jeté au ravin.
A perdu son âme,
S'est tu sur son corps :
À celle-ci le mal,
Pour celui-là les crocs.
Passant, passe ! Mais de cet exemple retiens
Comme l'amour et néfaste, et la foi — un bien.
(« Épitaphe », 15 juin 1892)”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, Trois rencontres