Hazel > Hazel's Quotes

“I become one of those people who walks alone in the dark at night while others sleep or watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns or pull all-nighters to finish up some paper that's due first thing tomorrow. I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece. I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“And there you are
on the shore,

fitful and thoughtful, trying
to attach them to an idea —
some news of your own life.
But the lilies

are slippery and wild—they are
devoid of meaning, they are
simply doing,
from the deepest

spurs of their being,
what they are impelled to do
every summer.
And so, dear sorrow, are you.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Life is a message scribbled in the dark.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.”
― Truman Capote, The Thanksgiving Visitor

“I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“She sounds the way bananas taste.”
― Truman Capote

“They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“The blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“It's redundant to die in Los Angeles.”
― Truman Capote

“Men always remember a woman who caused them concern and uneasiness.”
― Coco Chanel

“This is the story of V and me.
Look. Each person has the possibilities of being simultaneously several beings, having several lives. The good family man doesn’t have a sense of responsibility. Simultaneously, he’s my angel. Simultaneously, his family’s a pack of incontinent dogs. In front of men such as him who believe they’re respectable, I love to talk about who they really are, the people they don’t want to know and socially and politically chastise. Look. I have loved and worshiped a pig.
This society hates and locks up its madness because they hate and lock up themselves. I know the system of schizophrenia. Nevertheless I loved a pig and couldn’t stop.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”
― William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

“With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger