Emily > Emily's Quotes

“Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting…”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“The wound my unsuspecting heart formerly received is not healed,” [Mary Wollstonecraft] wrote to a friend. “I found my evenings solitary; and I wished, while fulfilling the duty of a mother, to have some person with similar pursuits, bound to me by affection; and beside, I earnestly desired to resign a name which seemed to disgrace me.”
― Joanna Biggs, A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again – A New York Times Most Anticipated Memoir Collection of Feminism and Literary History

“This is the problem with human relationships: you come to a person with one feeling and they’re having another.”
― Melissa Broder, Death Valley

“Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain, but when one has it there’s no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don’t think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn’t happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don’t need company, whether you are not in a mood to go out. No, don’t worry, they’ll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“And I cried about all the things people can not understand when other people say them. I cried over the miracle that they could understand anything at all. I cried for all the things I had said to other people that had been misunderstood because I, not knowing, had said them wrong. I cried with joy about those times when someone and I had nodded together, grinning over an understanding, real or wished for.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

“What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words.”
― Don DeLillo

“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

“We admire and try to collect things not so much for their beauty or value as for their association with a phase of our past; and that is understandable, every generation has done the same. But with us the association seems to be not with our politically historical past, but with a kind of private vernacular past—what we cherish are mementos of a bygone daily existence without a definite date.”
― J.B. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics

“The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation—and that’s almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

“Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“How can any of us ever be sure that we know what other people mean when they use words?”
― Lynne Murphy, The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English

“So hard is it to discover the truth, because the history of past ages is rendered difficult by the lapse of time; while in contemporary history the truth is always obscured, either by private spite and hatred, or by a desire to curry favour with the chief men of the time.”
― Plutarch, Pericles

“…and somehow vaguely foreseeing that life would be like this: full of many special things that are meant for one person alone and that cannot be told.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“The things we experience often cannot be expressed, and anyone who insists on telling them nevertheless, is bound to make mistakes…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God

“Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as painting and drawings are.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“As it’s told, it is altered, as all stories are in the telling, by time, will, perception, faith, love, work, by hope, decrepit, imagination, fear, history and the thousand other variable powers that play upon our personal narratives.”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

“It is an old aphorism that familiarity breeds contempt. Like most old aphorisms—which should be reexamined annually and then thrown out of court—it isn’t always true. Familiarity at worst breeds, as a rule, only familiarity; at best, it breeds something approaching adoration.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Getting here had become part of what being here meant.”
― D.J. Waldie, Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place

“Maybe you can’t ever really walk away from the things you want most to walk away from.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Who can say why we offer the parts of ourselves we do, and when. (“Rondine al Nido”)”
― Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn

“Over time, we all become committed to a version of the story of our lives. Simplification and repetition solidify the account, and we tend to stick with that identity. But that is old news.”
― Bob Woodward, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat

“Of course I was being sincere, but you can be sincere and be wrong, or in any case you can persuade yourself that you’re wrong as sincerely as you persuaded yourself to the contrary. “Nine Columns for an Italian Magazine”
― Emmanuel Carrère, 97,196 Words: Essays

“This fear [of commitment] is founded on a lucid and even wise apprehension of reality: the knowledge of the transience of things and feelings, of our inability to master them, of the risk that we may no longer be tomorrow who we are today, which also goes for the other person. But such lucidity and wisdom are paralyzing: if you listened to them, you wouldn’t say yes to anything… “Nine Columns for an Italian Magazine”
― Emmanuel Carrère, 97,196 Words: Essays

“Man, it would seem, does not evolve; he accumulates. (“Prehistoric Eyes”)”
― Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays