Ana > Ana's Quotes

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
― David Foster Wallace

“And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”
― Mary Oliver

“… and I’ll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears”
― Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems

“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”
― Michel Foucault

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination...”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Once, just once in my life, not in the cerebral anaemia of sleep but in reality, a door did stand before me. That door opened. It was opened by someone who defended her solitude and impotent misery so fiercely that she would have kept that door shut though a flaming roof crackled over her head. I alone had the power to make her open that lock. In turning the key she put more trust in me than she ever did in God, and in that fateful moment I believed I was godlike – all-wise, judicious, benevolent and rational. We were both wrong: she who put her faith in me, and I who thought too well of myself.”
― Magda Szabó, The Door

“They couldn't have dropped the bomb for all the Galaxy. If they could have, they
would have been large-primate themselves in their manner of thinking, and there are worse things than merely the end of
everything.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Complete Stories, Vol. 1

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God