“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four AM and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10 km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing, I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. … Writing is like a survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”
– Haruki Murakami
“Men are not my target audience.”
– Linda Evangelista
“So you attempt to hide your loneliness in public, to behave, in fact, as though you have too many friends already, and thus you hope to attract people who will unwittingly save you. But it never works that way. Your condition is written all over your face, in the hunch of your shoulders, in the hollowness of your laugh. You fool no one.”
– David Murosek
“Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”
– Julian Barnes
“Why is it that we talk and talk, or at least I certainly do, without somehow conveying what we’re really like?”
– Stories That We Tell (2012) dir. by Sarah Polley
“Islam doesn’t promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion and like every religion in the world, in depends on what you bring to it. If you’re a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism is going to be violent. There are marauding Buddhist monks in Myanmar slaughtering women and children. Does Buddhism promote violence? Of course not. People are violent or peaceful, and that depends on their politics their social world, the way that they see their communities, the way they see themselves.”
– Religious scholar Reza Aslan answers CNN’s question, “Does Islam promote violence?”
“Things happen the way they have to.”
– Ramana Maharshi
“I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.”
– Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
“If no woman in your life has ever talked to you about how she lives her life with an undercurrent of fear of men, consider the possibility that it may be because she sees you as one of those men she cannot really trust.”
–
—Chris Clarke, How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men (2011 version)
“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”
– Tana French, In the Woods
“You see, I have this habit of turning people into poetry before they touch me.”
“You must be prepared to work always without applause.”
– Ernest Hemingway
“but if no one ever listens, does it matter what I said?”
– Tablo, (Epik High - Open M.I.C)
“all new learning looks at first
like chaos.”
– Adrienne Rich, fromPowers Of Recuperation
“Inspiration is a byproduct of discipline… simply getting up everyday and planning, plotting, sketching, setting up or actually applying paint to a painting.”
– Beverly Claridge
“Why does one write? For whom does one write? If you begin asking that, you stop writing! You write, that’s all. And people read you. You write for the people who read you. It’s writers nobody reads who ask themselves questions like that!”
– Simone de Beauvoir, from The Mandarins
“A woman sitting by herself is not waiting for you.”
–Caitlin Stasey
“A woman’s whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life.”
– The Hours (2002) dir. by Stephen Daldry
“God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly. Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches… I’m lost.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Overwhelmed by lack of time, race of time, speed of time, I retreat into non-thought - merely into Epicurean sensual observations and desires - momentary ephemeral flashes of well being and ill-being. Do I think? After a fashion. Do I put myself in other people’s minds and viscera? No. Not half enough. Do I listen? Yes. Do I create? No. I reproduce. I have no imagination. I am submerged in circling ego. I listen, God knows why. I say I am interested in people. Am I rationalizing? Maybe it’s too uncomfortable to know much of anything.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
“Your pain is so great that probably it does not
hurt you.”
– Antonio Porchia, from Voices
“Of late, she had felt coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.”
– Catherynne M. Valente,Deathless
“I think the average guy thinks they’re pro-woman, just because they think they’re a nice guy and someone has told them that they’re awesome. But the truth is far from it. Unless you are actively, consciously working against the gravitational pull of the culture, you will predictably, thematically, create these sort of fucked-up representations.”
– Junot Diaz
“
Think about anyone who has come out as bisexual in the media. Megan Fox, Billie Joe Armstrong, Margaret Cho, Anna Paquin, Megan Mullally, David Bowie, Angelina Jolie.
Their sexuality is usually glossed over — often times, the media decides the person is either gay or straight, depending the relationship they are currently in or the relationship they get into in the future. If a man comes out as bisexual and in the future gets into a relationship with another man, people generally define him as homosexual (such as Alan Cumming). It’s important to note both homosexual and heterosexual people are monosexual and only attracted to one gender. In saying someone is straight or gay based on who they are currently with totally negates an individual’s identity.
Several people throughout have been classified as monosexual, despite identifying as bi. Marlon Brando himself was bisexual and he’s well-known as a “manly” man, it’s no surprise that people would want to erase his sexuality to fit their perception of him. Anne Frank was also bisexual; she wrote about having a love for girls and wanting a girl to date in her diaries. Angelina Jolie is one of the most well-known bisexuals and she still gets marked under a monosexual title because of her long term relationship with Brad Pitt. Yet, in doing this, people are neglecting her identity.
”
– Bisexual Erasure: What It Is and How to Avoid It
“Think of what starlight
And lamplight would lack
Diamonds and fireflies
If they couldn’t lean against Black.”
– Mary O’Neill
“It’s often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It’s what writing comes down to—worrying that things aren’t going to work out.”
– Khaled Hosseini
“Writing is…. being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”
– Mary Gaitskill
“Please be aware that everyone is not out to get you. It’s so sad to watch a person ruin a great connection that has potential to grow and mold into something beautiful because of fear, or residue from the past. Learn to realize that people can genuinely love just as hard as you do and possibly more.”
– Awakened Vibrations
“Mostly I long to do nothing. Where on earth can I go to be left in peace?”
– Liv Ullmann, from Changing
“I’d much rather be someone’s shot of whiskey than everyone’s cup of tea.”
– Carrie Bradshaw
“Popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic. It is a theater of popular desires, a theater of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time.”
– Stuart Hall
“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”
– Henry Louis Mencken
“In a way I admired her. I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself.”
– Margaret Atwood, from Cat’s Eye
“How shall I be nice? I will try, but I know I will be tempted to be tragic instead.”
– Anaïs Nin
“Paris is like the girl that’s rude to you at a bar at first, and then you eventually fall in love with her the most.”
– Kanye West, Vogue Apr 2014
“be willing to move forward imperfectly.”
“I don’t even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it.”
– Salinger, J.D.. The Catcher in the Rye.
“Most of the time, on the contrary, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. This means that we do not want to correct ourselves or to be improved: for that, first of all, we should have to be judged and found wanting. All we need is to be pitied and encouraged in our course. In short, we would like at the same time to be no longer guilty and not make the effort to purify ourselves. Not enough cynicism, not enough virtue. We have neither the energy of evil nor that of good.”
– Albert Camus, The Fall
“Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.”
– Joseph Conrad
“I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.”
– Catherine Breillat
“I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.”
– Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”
“Just living is creative. Every decision we make in life is a creative one: sentences we string together, the way we get dressed in the morning. Every movement could be considered dance if you really open your mind to that feminine plane of thought.”
– Antony Hegarty in The Guardian in 2010
“I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.”
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
– Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin
Quaintrelle (n.) a woman who emphasizes a life of passion, expressed through personal style, leisurely pastimes, charm, and cultivation of life’s pleasures.
“There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”
– The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
“I couldn’t bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.”
– Nick Hornby, Slam
“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
– Richard Siken
“The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream.”
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“In my moon suit and funeral veil, I am no source of honey.”
– Sylvia Plath
“I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.”
– Michel Houellebecq
“Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you?”
“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
– Donald Winnicott
“I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say.”
– Marshall McLuhan
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstance we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.”
– Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
“I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
– J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“If you weren’t around, I’d probably be someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddamn place. You’re the only reason I’m around, practically.”
– J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“I felt like I was sort of disappearing. It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing everytime you crossed a road.”
– J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
–
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
“The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your ‘soul mate’ you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation”
– Monica Drake- Clown Girl
One day, I realized he might not exist. My soulmate, I mean.
I realized there might not be someone walking around this earth just waiting to meet me. Someone with a private world just as intricate as mine that, one day, I would get to share and be a part of and know.
And I realized I was keeping a vacant spot in my heart for this person who might not exist. That I wasn’t allowing myself to be whole because how could I be whole with my other half missing?
It was an excuse, of course. A simple view of life that would exempt me from having to put in the effort of filling myself up with the love I was waiting for someone else to supply.
The reality is this: Life is a churning, chaotic thing with no guarantees, and in the throws of the tumbling you might run into people to hold on to for a while. Sometimes for a night, sometimes for life.
And holding on to someone is a worthy thing. A wonderful thing. Something to look forward to and appreciate and embrace with your whole heart.
But the love you get from holding on to someone will never be as reliable as the love you can give yourself. Right here. Right now.
So here’s my advice. Be open to love, but don’t be empty for it.
”
– Open, Not Empty - John Paul Brammer
“Try to love yourself as much as you want someone else to.”
– My English Teacher
“I must have flowers, always, and always.”
– Claude Monet
“If you had started doing anything two weeks ago, by today you would have been two weeks better at it.”
– John Mayer
“It’s odd being in someone else’s room when they’re not there. Especially when you love them. Every object carried a different significant. Why did she buy that? What does she especially like? Why does she sit in this chair and not that one?”
– "Written on the Body" by Jeanette Winterson
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
– Pablo Picasso (1881–1973, Spanish)
Etymologically, glamour has to do with magic, as well as learning. It’s related to the word “grammatica,” which was used to describe not only scholarly knowledge, but occult practices. Enchantment, fantasy, deception, etc.
““You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperience and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it’s being in delusion. All romantic people are the same,” she added. “My mother spends her life in making stories about the people she’s fond of. But I won’t have you do it about me, if I can help it.”
“You can’t help it,” he said.
“I warn you it’s the source of all evil.”
“And of all good,” he added.””
– Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
“It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.”
– John Holmes
“Oh, God, I’m only twenty and I’ll have to go on living and living and living.”
– Jean Rhys, from Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
“The sober graciousness of solitude. The sense of freedom in being not present in another’s consciousness, not registered in another’s thoughts. Strange sensation. Like having no shadow.”
– Joyce Carol Oates, from a journal entry
“By the time I left St. Martin’s, I could not justify myself being an artist at all, because I did not meet anyone there who was doing interesting art that was also getting through to everyday people. [Students there were] exploring apathy, dressing up in some pigeon outfit, or running around conceptualizing. My life did not allow it: My mom was getting evicted, my brother was going to jail, I’d get my first phone call from my dad in twelve years confirming he’s still alive. So making ripples in the water, to aesthetically represent beauty, just didn’t make sense [to me].”
– M.I.A.
“The iPod, like the Walkman cassette player before it, allows us to listen to our music wherever we want. Previously, recording technology had unlinked music from the concert hall, the café, and the saloon, but now music can always be carried with us. Michael Bull, who has written frequently about the impact of the Walkman and the iPod, points out that we often use devices to ‘aestheticize urban space.’ We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy, and the next it’s an action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same….Theodor Adorno… called this situation ‘accompanied solitude,’ a situation where we might be alone, but we have the ability via music to create the illusion that we are not.”
–
from How Music Works, by David Byrne
“It’s so much easier to write for a person in your life than to write for some imagined readership, so you write something that’s more intimate and true.”
– Jonah Paretti
“People will leave you but that doesn’t mean it’s your fault.”
“I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.”
– Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“Being aware of stillness means to be still. To be still is to be conscious without thought. You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself, than when you are still. When you are still, you are who you were before you temporarily assumed this physical and mental form called a person. You are also who you will be when the form dissolves. When you are still, you are who you are beyond your temporal existence: consciousness – unconditioned, formless, eternal.”
– Eckhart Tolle
“I finally figured out that I’m solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won’t go away. It doesn’t matter where I am, or how alone—I always have such a crowded head.”
– Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream
“Exactitude is not truth.”
– Henri Matisse
“our true stories were lousy. our stories were slick black things that we spit out of our mouths onto the table in front of us. we were trying to sell something. we were trying to sell our loneliness, and no one was buying. and we were getting tired of dark looming things. we were getting tired of trying to glue words onto doom.”
– richard siken, love from a distance
“The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you’ve done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well. Not indifference, not apathy—but self-containment is the result.”
– Joyce Carol Oates, from a journal entry
“People are no longer horrified or moved, they are merely interested or not interested.”
– Joyce Carol Oates, from a journal entry
“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we get from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio winding down.”
– Margaret Atwood
“There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other. Why grow sad from one’s sadness and delight in one’s joy? What does it matter whether our tears come from pleasure or pain? Love your unhappiness and hate your happiness, mix everything up, scramble it all! Be a snowflake dancing in the air, a flower floating downstream! Have courage when you don’t need to, and be a coward when you must be brave! Who knows? You may still be a winner! And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is loss, all loss is gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.”
– Emil Cioran, from On The Heights Of Despair
“To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I.”
– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
“It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.”
– J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says, “I’m important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
– Sylvia Plath - Taken From‘The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath’
“Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages… a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn’t be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.”
– Umberto Eco; On The History Of Ugliness.
“One listless day followed another, with nothing to distinguish one from the next. You could have changed the order and no one would have noticed.”
– Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
“In every conversation between three people, one person is superfluous and therefore prevents the depth of the conversation.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, from Aphorisms
“A male author can write about unlikable male characters. They’re called anti-heroes and it’s called a novel.”
– Gillian Flynn on people calling her writing misogynistic in Glamour magazine, the October 2014 issue. The level of sass and taking no shit from both her and Rosamund Pike-who Flynn interviews in this article-is strong and gives me life.
“I am not a puzzle to be solved.
I am someone to be experienced-
a soul to be tasted”
– jenn satsune
“Music is the only thing that will give and give and give and not take…”
– Amy Winehouse, from aninterview
“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
“You need others. Too often people think that being unique means being isolated, and being a great artist means coming up with genius ideas out of nowhere. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”
– John Lasseter
“And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.”– Mary Oliver
“Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet? The search for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? All over the world there are, indeed, entertainment firms and organisations which exploit cinema and television and spectacles of many other kinds. Our starting-point, however, should not be there, but in the essential principles of cinema, which have to do with the human need to master and know the world. I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: ‘stars’, story-lines and entertainment have nothing to do with it.”
– Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting In Time (1987)
