Brie > Brie's Quotes

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”
― Anais Nin

“Love is Not All

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano