Jessica > Jessica's Quotes

“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“Un mot et tout est perdu, un mot et tout est sauvé.”
― Andre Breton

“To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only Heaven.”
― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

“For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”
― Gertrude Stein

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”
― Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

“Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“And what is beauty?” “Terror.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I hate Gucci,' said Francis.

'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.'

'Come on, Henry.'

'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.'

'I don't see what you think is grand about that.'

'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale,' said Henry.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“We stared at the house for a while. The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The bereaved must be urged to “sit in a sunny room,” preferably one with an open fire.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Death,” he wrote, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,” Philippe Ariès wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. “But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“You are a lady,’ he says softly, ‘and young, and handsome.—I don’t speak from gallantry now, you know that. I say only what is true. You might do anything. ’ ‘You are a man,’ I answer. ‘Men’s truths are different from ladies’. I may do nothing, I assure you.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“His throat bulges queerly, as men’s throats do: as if inviting the blow that will crush it.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“I could not want a lover, more than I want freedom.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“I don’t want to understand you,’ I say tiredly. ‘I wish you would not speak at all.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“You have been put too much to literary work,’ he said on one of his visits, ‘and that is the cause of your complaint.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith