Lee > Lee's Quotes

“I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.”
― Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

“The truth is that the world is full of dragons, and none of us are as powerful or cool as we’d like to be. And that sucks. But when you’re confronted with that fact, you can either crawl into a hole and quit, or you can get out there, take off your shoes, and Bilbo it up.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
― Pablo Picasso

“I am not the first person you loved.
You are not the first person I looked at
with a mouthful of forevers. We
have both known loss like the sharp edges
of a knife. We have both lived with lips
more scar tissue than skin. Our love came
unannounced in the middle of the night.
Our love came when we’d given up
on asking love to come. I think
that has to be part
of its miracle.
This is how we heal.
I will kiss you like forgiveness. You
will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms
will bandage and we will press promises
between us like flowers in a book.
I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat
on your skin. I will write novels to the scar
of your nose. I will write a dictionary
of all the words I have used trying
to describe the way it feels to have finally,
finally found you.

And I will not be afraid
of your scars.

I know sometimes
it’s still hard to let me see you
in all your cracked perfection,
but please know:
whether it’s the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
or the nights you collapse into my lap
your body broken into a thousand questions,
you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane.”
― Clementine von Radics

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If anyone else were to kiss me, all they would taste is your name.”
― Clementine von Radics

“I pity the woman who will love you
when I am done. She will show up
to your first date with a dustpan
and broom, ready to pick up all the pieces
I left you in. She will hear my name so often
it will begin to dig holes in her. That
is where doubt will grow. She will look
at your neck, your thin hips, your mouth,
wondering at the way I touched you.
She will make you all the promises I did
and some I never could. She will hear only
the terrible stories. How I drank. How I lied.
She will wonder (as I have) how someone
as wonderful as you could love a monster
like the woman who came before her. Still,
she will compete with my ghost.
She will understand why you do not look
in the back of closets. Why you are afraid
of what’s under the bed. She will know
every corner of you is haunted
by me.”
― Clementine von Radics

“A long time ago, before I even met you,
someone replaced my chest with a broken record.
For years, it’s been stammering through
the same old tune.
I want you to know I’m trying.
I quit smoking. I’m doing yoga. And those days
I wake up wishing for death are getting fewer
and farther apart.

No, I’m not ok. But I haven’t been ok
since I was 11, maybe 12. I am still here though.
I’m still breathing. For me, sometimes, that
will have to be enough”
― Clementine von Radics

“The insomnia I am talking about results from a mild state of possession, harmless to those around you, who sometimes even fail to notice it. It usually comes when you are completely engrossed in your work and overtakes you so completely that every aspect of your daily life becomes mechanical and provides only a colorless backdrop to action occurring only in your mind. It matters not whether at this time you are asleep or awake. The secret life pulses within you, and when you wake in the middle of the night you realize there is no way to stem its flow.”
― Ludmila Ulitskaya

“There is no escaping life. It takes what is it's due.”
― Ludmilla Ulitskaya, Daniel Stein, Interpreter

“Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul”
― Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Зеленый шатер

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.”
― Errol Flynn

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
― Cecil Day Lewis

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.”
― Elizabeth Kostovia, The Historian

“People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past--the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty.”
― Tom Rachman, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Spoiler Alert I just read ahead to the last page of your life and it turns out that you were always worthy of love and hope and surpassing kindness.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest