L > L's Quotes

“We are all worthy of one another.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man . . . stops learning at fourteen or so.”
― Edward P. Jones, The Known World

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“And I hope each morning you wake like a bird in a nest and fly without a thought.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“Your letter filled the hole in my day like a key.

Turn it.”
― Bill Callahan

“I wanted to hold you until I heard one voice. I stood without intention of moving and realized we see every punch coming in a boxing movie but in real life we miss a lot of them.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“It crossed my mind that my letters are all about me and not you. I would hope that you pay me the same respect.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“I sometimes see a shortcoming in myself, how little patience or understanding I have for many people in the way they act. I am able to see the fragility in some, but I only have so much time to wade through their manipulations and traps and draining behaviour. Some people think I'm heartless in leaving others to suffer their own selves.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“To create one's own world takes courage.”
― georgia o'keeffe

“Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.”
― Virginia Woolf

“To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“To love makes one solitary.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“Love is never any better than the lover.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.”
― Machado de Assis

“In the world I am
Always a stranger
I do not understand its language
It does not understand my silence”
― Bei Dao

“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.”
― Janet Frame

“I should like a parsley sandwich.
To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.”
― Edward Gorey

“Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan. She writes stories like I approach "Land of a Thousand Dances": she's caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, come through. It could be a leopard, that light, or it could be a spot of blood. It could be anything. But she hooks onto that and spirals out. And she does it within the accessible rhythms of plot, and that's really exciting. She's not hung up with being a woman, she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot.

Another great woman writer is Iris Sarazan, who wrote The Runaway. She considered herself a mare, a wild runaway. She was a really intelligent girl stuck in all these convents with a hungry mind. I identify with her 'cause of her hunger to go beyond herself. She wound up in prison, but she escaped and wrote some great books before kicking off. Her books aren't page after page of her beating her breast about how shitty she's been treated, they're books about her exciting telescoping plans of escape. Rhythm, great wild rhythm....

The French poet, Rimbaud, predicted that the next great crop of writers would be women. He was the first guy who ever made a big women's liberation statement, saying that when women release themselves from the long servitude of men they're really gonna gush. New rhythms, new poetries, new horrors, new beauties. And I believe in that completely. (1976 Penthouse interview)”
― Patti Smith

“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

“My mamma and I have interesting literary discussions like the following which took place over some Modern Library books that I had just ordered:

SHE: “Mobby Dick. I’ve always heard about that.”
ME: “Mow-by Dick.”
SHE: “Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What’s it about?”
ME: “An idiot.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I don’t know how to cure the source-itis except to tell you that I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise Blood but I am often embarrassed to find that I read the sources after I had written the book. I have been exposed to Wordsworth’s “Intimation” ode but that is all I can say about it. I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of the way it went in. The Oedipus business comes nearer home. Of course Haze Motes is not an Oedipus figure but there are the obvious resemblances. At the time I was writing the last of the book, I was living in Connecticut with the Robert Fitzgeralds. Robert Fitzgerald translated the Theban cycle with Dudley Fitts, and their translation of the Oedipus Rex had just come out and I was much taken with it. Do you know that translation? I am not an authority on such things but I think it must be the best, and it is certainly very beautiful. Anyway, all I can say is, I did a lot of thinking about Oedipus.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor