yasmin > yasmin's Quotes

“This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“once I believed
love poems were foolish

now I read love poems
just for the sake of it

and yet perhaps I want
to reach a higher state of poetry

I don't know if that's right or wrong
but such a feeling persists anyway

and sometimes irritates me
provoking outrageous desires

once I believed
love poems were foolish

yet now I do nothing
but dream about love”
― Chūya Nakahara

“No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. ”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“(D)ying is hard, but living is harder still.

—Vincent van Gogh”
― Deborah Heiligman, Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers

“My darling Naomi, I don't just love you, I worship you. You're my treasure. You're a diamond that I found and polished. I'll buy you anything that'll make you beautiful. I'll give you my whole salary.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi

“If you’re the sickness, I suppose you can’t also be the cure.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black. As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“Destroy superabundance. Starve the flesh, shave the hair, clarify the mind, define the will, restrain the senses, leave the family, flee the church, kill the vermin,vomit the heart, forget the dead. Limit time, forgo amusement, deny nature, reject acquaintances, discard objects, forget truths, dissect myth, stop motion, block impulse, choke sobs, swallow chatter. Scorn joy, scorn touch, scorn tragedy, scorn liberty, scorn constancy, scorn hope, scorn exaltation, scorn reproduction, scorn variety, scorn embellishment, scorn release, scorn rest, scorn sweetness, scorn light. It's a question of form as much as function. It is a matter of revulsion.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that.”
― Rumi, Hush, Don't Say Anything to God: Passionate Poems of Rumi

“My alone feels so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude.”
― Warsan Shire

“The Germans sell chemical weapons to Iran and Iraq. The wounded are then sent to Germany to be treated. Veritable human guinea pigs.”
― Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis

“Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things