Christina M Rau > Christina's Quotes

“Shame on you for dating a musician. At your age.”
― Katherine Taylor, Rules for Saying Goodbye: A Novel

“I am always looking outside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what's out there. And what's out there is constantly changing.”
― Robert Frank, Robert Frank: Pull My Daisy

“There is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.”
― Jean Cocteau

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“What takes place in me stays there.”
― Frank Bidart

“Poetry by its very nature is subversive . . . It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.”
― Cristina Garcia, The Lady Matador's Hotel

“To live your life even half right seems extraordinary.”
― Cristina Garcia, The Lady Matador's Hotel

“This is what language is:
a habitual grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this:
which hurts
just enough to be a scar
And heals just enough to be a nation.”
― Eavan Boland, The Lost Land: Poems

“Leadership is a word people use to reconcile any kind of charisma that was impossible to otherwise explain.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Downtown Owl

“Time is a track that loops back on itself, where memories rattle like tin trains. How had I been spending my days, but in the whirl of memories?”
― Steve Almond, Which Brings Me to You

“The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.”
― Vijay Seshadri, Wild Kingdom

“Then solar systems, galaxies, supernovas, infinite space itself will become elements of a final masterwork--a never-ending festival, a celestial amusement park in which every exploding star and spinning electron is part of the empyreal choreography.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“Wasn't I rapt?
Wasn't I ravished?”
― C.K. Williams

“The function of art is to make people like life more than they do.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“There are psychologists who think that consciousness accompanies brain processes and is determined by them but doesn't itself exert any influence on them. Something like the reflection of a tree in water; it couldn't exist without the tree, but it doesn't in any way affect he tree. I think it's all stuff and nonsense to say that there can be love without passion; when people say love can endure after passion is dead they're talking of something else, affection, kindliness, community of taste and interest, and habit . . . Of course there can be desire without love. Desire isn't passion. Desire is the natural consequence of the sexual instinct . . . That's why women are foolish to make a song and dance if their husbands have an occasional flutter when the time and place are propitious . . . what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose . . . Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction but impediment . . . When passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive . . . and if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge