Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“pain can work form the outside in.”
― Jack Ketchum

“Sometimes...you can cry until there's nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever god you think will listen. And, still it makes no difference. It goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that if it ever did relent...it would not be because it cared.”
― Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut

“My delusionary hell does not agree with yours.”
― Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut

“Nothing quite brings out the zest for life in a person like the thought of their impending death”
― Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut

“The numbing mind-ream of knowing you're alone not because people won't accept you but because you find so little worth accepting. An imposed solitude is better than simply tolerating your company in waiting for something better. So loneliness is not such a terrible thing when you consider that the alternative to thought provoking solace is to be surrounded only by remindings of why that solitude is preferable.”
― Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny The Homicidal Maniac #2

“I've excluded happiness as one of those possibilities we seek for ourselves. Oh, I still want it, but that's beside the point. Contentment - they say it's the ultimate, but I can't even wish for that. I don't even want the desire to be content. I can only hope for silence.”
― Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut

“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.”
― Poppy Z.Brite

“He has 'le coeur comme un artichaud'. Eddy fumbled for her high school French. 'A heart like an artichoke?' 'Oui. He has a leaf for everyone, but makes a meal for no one.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Wormwood

“All I ever wanted, nira I expected: Nonette, upon whom my life pivots.

The name I give my fire when I lay down, defenseless before its majestic awfulness.

A little no, a little negation. A French girly pout, the syllables for which have been found at last.

All my hurt dug up, exposed for dissection in the glaring light, and finally melted away by the loving caresses of her yielding thighs.

And the girl who took such simple joy in this terrible duty.

Nonette.”
― Julian Darius, Nira/Sussa

“Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven't got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say: It is not a pearl we have lost, but a swine?”
― Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

“To die, - To sleep, - To sleep!
Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn't make sense if you don't." (145)”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge , The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.”
― R.L. Stine

“[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.”
― Clive Barker

“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”
― H. P. Lovecraft, Nemesis

“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”
― André Gide, Prometheus Illbound

“I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita