Anne > Anne's Quotes

“Cathy, this lamb of yours threatens like a bull!' he said. 'It is in danger of splitting its skull against my knuckles. By God! Mr. Linton, I'm mortally sorry that you are not worth knocking down!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“What’s with her?” says the painter.

“She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction.

I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.”
― Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

“But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Heart disease syphilis pregnancy
All you creeps on the street get away from me”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
― Oscar Wilde

“By 12.30, Giles had consumed five gin-rickies, four gin-and-tonics, three gin-and-its, two gin-and-bitters, and one gin.”
― Martin Amis, Dead Babies

“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“You were doing fine," a familiar voice informed my ear, "until that man stepped into your path.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Patrick actually used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“If your wish is to become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers