Simone > Simone's Quotes

“We can stick anything into the fog
and make it look like a ghost
but tonight
let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows,
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.

Tonight
let’s turn our silly wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in our pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts.
Move forward
and repeat after me with your heart:

“I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.”

Make love to me
like you know I am better
than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this.
But I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized

that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it,
that we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it,
that if my heart
really broke
every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.

But hearts don’t break,
y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I’m having a fantastic time.”
― Buddy Wakefield

“It has been found again.
What? –
Eternity.
It is the sea mingled with the sun.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I stopped watching for ridicule, the scorpion's tail hidden in his words. He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“..time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“Occasionally you'll say "Excuse me" when I happen to stand in your way, and "Thank you" when your ball drifts into my court and I hurl it back to you. With these few words, I find comfort in false hopes and hope in false starts. I'll coddle anything instead of nothing. Even thinking that nothing can come of nothing gives me a leg to stand on, something to consider when I wake up in the middle of the night and can see nothing, not the blackout in my life, not the screen, not the cellar, not even hope and false comforts -just the joy of your imagined limb touching mine. I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what's called a broken heart.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Find Cupid everywhere in Rome because we'd clipped one of his wings and he was forced to fly in circles.”
― André Aciman

“Some people may be brokenhearted not because they’ve been hurt but because they’ve never found someone who mattered enough to hurt them”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“No one's serious at seventeen,
When lindens line the promenades”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“You can't exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Give me an honest con man any day.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse him of having created an ugly world.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Wittgenstein dislikes all ornamentation that is not part of the construction, and never find anything simple enough.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

“Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland

“I believe that we need to adapt our philosophy to our science, and not our science to our philosophy.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

“the properties of an object become manifest when this object interacts with others. We cannot separate the properties from these other objects. We cannot attribute them just to a single object. All of the (variable) properties of an object, in the final analysis, are such and exist only with respect to other objects.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

“A lightbulb does not emit continuous light, it emits a hail of evanescent photons. At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete. Schrödinger had fought tooth and nail against quantum discontinuity, against Bohr’s quantum leaps, against Heisenberg’s world of matrices: he wanted to defend the image of continuous reality provided by classical intuition.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Abbiamo bisogno di molto tempo per accettare la brutalità del fatto di non essere più soli”
― Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Camere separate

“So I waited. Then I got used to waiting. Eventually, waiting was more real than what we had.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I live for this. And if this is all there is, well, this is all there is.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“However contradictory the coroner's report — whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death — isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories