C. > C.'s Quotes

“I AM THAT I AM. [Exodus 3:14]”
― Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness

“But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“God, for me, is more of a feeling, a feeling of peace. I think my god lives in a silence that exists inside me. It's such a delicious fucking silence, so profound.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“I will be” is a confession that “I am not “ The Father's will is always “I AM.” Until you realize that YOU are the Father (there is only one I AM and your infinite self is that I AM), your will is always “I will be.”
― Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness

“Hippolytus: Do you believe in God?
Priest: (Looks at him.)
Hippolytus: I know what I am. And always will be. But you. You sin knowing you'll confess. Then you're forgiven. And then you start all over again.
How do you dare mock a God so powerful? Unless you don't really believe.
Priest: This is your confession, not mine.
Hippolytus: Then why are you on your knees? God certainly is merciful. If I were him I'd despise you. I'd wipe you off the face of the earth for your dishonesty.
Priest: You're not God.
Hippolytus: No. A prince. God on earth. But not God. Fortunate for all concerned. I'd not allow you to sin knowing you'd confess and get away with it.
Priest: Heaven would be empty.
Hippolytus: A kingdom of honest men, honestly sinning. And death for those who try to cover their arse.”
― Sarah Kane, Phaedra's Love

“The moon is definitely judging me. Dogs knows the truth. Babies see through me. Anything natural, anything pure: judging me.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.”
― Georges Bataille

“I am an eater who enjoys structured magic. I don't feel courageous enough to let myself eat whatever I want, because I don't want to face the wrath of what my mind will do to me after. I have a vested interest in keeping things under control, because when I lose my illusions of control I get very scared.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“... the ultimate resolution of that shame is always self-acceptance by way of another's acceptance. To me, that's sexual fulfillment.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“PHAEDRE: You're in pain. I adore you.”
― Sarah Kane, Phaedra's Love

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“If there is a God, I'd like to look him in the face knowing I'd died as I lived. In conscious sin.”
― Sarah Kane, Phaedra's Love

“But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“I do remember that as a young girl I prayed for beauty. I'd lie in bed, squeeze my eyes shut, and concentrate so hard that I broke out in a sweat underneath the covers. I believed that for God to take you seriously, you had to make your mind as blank as possible and then focus on the expanding spots of light behind your eyelids and think only of the one thing you desperately wished for.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Definitely thought I was a lesbian until we dated and then I thought I might just be asexual, or not asexual, actually, but even more deeply fucked up than I ever knew: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“She knows that a small, soft animal lives inside her, and that animal wants to be loved completely, flat on its back, kissed and cuddled. She wants that [...]
- LARISSA PHAM, AUTHOR OF "Trust”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“In essence, love raises the feeling of one being for another to such a pitch that the threatened loss of the beloved or the loss of his love is felt no less keenly than the threat of death. Hence love is based on a
desire to live in anguish in the presence of an object of such high worth that the heart cannot bear to contemplate losing it. The fever of the senses is not a desire to die. Nor is love the desire to lose but the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“If I get married, I want to be very married.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“He had been been patting his handkerchief between his palms; now he opened his handkerchief and reached out and wiped my forehead. "You're all I've got," he said then, with a shy, pained grin. "Be careful."
"Daddy," I said. And began to cry. And if speaking had been agony, this was worse and yet I could not stop.
And my father's face changed. It became terribly old and at the same time absolutely helplessly young ...
"Don't cry," he said, "don't cry.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Strophe: They do love him. Everyone loves him. He despises them for it. You'd be no different.
Phaedra: You could feel such pleasure.”
― Sarah Kane, Phaedra's Love

“Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Phaedra: Can't switch this off. Can't crush it. Can't. Wake up with it, burning me. Think I'll crack open I want him so much. I talk to him. He talks to me, you know, we, we know each other very well, he tells me things, we're very close. About sex and how much it depresses him, and I know -”
― Sarah Kane, Phaedra's Love

“And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“I wanted you to come back,' he said. He touched her. She was so wet, so wet. Sliding in and out of her he said, 'I like to see how I hurt you there, how I stab you there, in the little wound.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus