Noora > Noora's Quotes

“There on the dune, beside the table, one of the camel boys has his arm around the other, and they sit there like that as they watch the sun. The dunes are turning the same shades of adobe and aqua as the buildings of Marrakech. Two boys, arms around each other. To Less, it seems so foreign. It makes him sad. In his world, he never sees straight men doing this. Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago. They cannot sit on a dune like these teenagers and watch a sunset in each other’s embrace. This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”
― Jean Genet

“We understand more than we know.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“After all, nostalgia is an emotion for people with no future.”
― Kieron Gillen, Phonogram, Vol. 1: Rue Britannia

“Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am...only one of a different sort: one who risks his skin to prove his truths.”
― Ernesto Guevara

“I, you, he, she, we
In the garden of mystic lovers,
these are not true distinctions.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”
― Theodore Kaczynski

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
― Albert Einstein

“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”
― Jacques Derrida

“Maybe I’m a bad writer.”
“No. You’re a very good writer. Kalipso was a chef d’oeuvre. So beautiful, Arthur. I admired it a lot.”
Now Less is stumped. He probes his weaknesses. Too magniloquent? Too spoony? “Too old?” he ventures.
“We’re all over fifty, Arthur. It’s not that you’re a bad writer.” Finley pauses for effect. “It’s that you’re a bad gay.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“How long do you mean to be content?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley