I’m a huge sucker for quotes, from everyone and about everything, and so I decided to compile the most memorable ones I’ve come across. Hope you like them! (and if you don’t, blame the person it was attributed to… or more than likely mis-attributed to)
-
-
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”– Maya Angelou
- “It gets easier. Every day, it gets a little easier. But you got to do it every day; that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.” – Jogging Baboon, Bojack Horseman
- “Il n’y a guère autre chose que cela dans le monde : S’aimer.” – Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
- “Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.”– Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz
- “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.“– Lord Acton
Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World- “The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?”– V.M. Varga, Fargo
- “There’s violence to knowing the world isn’t what you thought.”– Gloria Burgle, Fargo
- “Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.”– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
- “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”– Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena
- “I told him one day it would seem like every player who came before Messi was playing a different sport.”– Samuel Eto’o to Patrick Vieira in 2005
- “Don’t write about him. Don’t try to describe him. Just watch him.”– Pep Guardiola
- “You’ll hunt me. You’ll condemn me, set the dogs on me. Because that’s what needs to happen. Because sometimes, the truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes, people deserve more. Sometimes, people deserve to have their faith rewarded.”– Batman, Batman: The Dark Knight
- “We’re put on this earth to do a job. And each of us gets the time we get to do it.”– Betsy Solverson, Fargo
- “Sometimes it is the people that no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine.”– Alan Turing, The Imitation Game
- “I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.” Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
- “It’s all one ghetto man, giant gutter in outer space.”– Rust Cohle, True Detective
- “I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- “I may reach the mountaintop, but I fear I shall never visit the valley below.”– The Lutece Twins, Bioshock: Infinite
- “‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ – ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat. – ‘I don’t much care where-‘ said Alice. – ‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.”– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- “There’s no such thing as truth. I mean it’s bullshit! Everyone has their own truth. And life just does whatever the fuck it wants.”– Tonya Harding, I, Tonya
- “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”– Oscar Wilde
- “‘You don’t ask if someone has integrity and pluck and has read a great many books in the hope of repairing the world,’ I said. ‘You just watch them, and figure it out for yourself.'”– Lemony Snicket, Why Should This Night Be Different From All Other Nights?
- “It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.”– J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- “It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”– Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Reptile Room
- “I’m still not sure how to tell you about all this… If we lived forever, maybe we’d have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes… and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is.”– What Remains of Edith Finch
- “No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”– Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
- “I don’t want you to be sad that I’m gone. I want you to be amazed that any of us ever had a chance to be here at all.”– What Remains of Edith Finch
- “I hope I have earned the privilege of your time.”– Katherine Newbury, Late Night
- “To us scientists, perfection… is despair. Be more amazing than anything that has existed before, but never be perfect. To be a scientist is to continually suffer that mutual exclusivity, and furthermore, to be a creature who must find pleasure within it.”– Kurotsuchi Mayuri, Bleach
- “There is skill to it. More importantly, it has to be joyful, effortless, fun. TV defeats its own purpose when it’s pushing an agenda, or trying to defeat other TV or being proud or ashamed of itself for existing. It’s TV; it’s comfort. It’s a friend you’ve known so well, and for so long you just let it be with you, and it needs to be okay for it to have a bad day or phone in a day, and it needs to be okay for it to get on a boat with Levar Burton and never come back. Because eventually, it all will.”– Abed Nadir, Community
- “I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.”– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
- “Cheer up, beautiful people… this is where you get to make it right.”– Walter White, Breaking Bad
- “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”– George Orwell, 1984
-
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”– George Orwell, 1984
- “People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.”– Rustin Cohle, True Detective
- “I know who I am… and after all these years, there’s a victory in that.”– Rustin Cohle, True Detective
- “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.”– William Blake
- “This above all else: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”– William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- “To realize that all your life — you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain — it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams there’s a monster at the end of it.”– Rustin Cohle, True Detective
- “What if there’s another story? What if something went unbroken? All this life, all this loss, what if it was just one long story that just kept going and going, until it healed itself? Wouldn’t that be a story worth telling? Wouldn’t that be a story worth hearing?”– Amelia Hays, True Detective
- “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”– Rob Siltanen
- “That’s the thing. I don’t think I believe in deep down. I kinda think that all you are is just the things you do.”– Diane Nguyen, Bojack Horseman
- “You’re Bojack Horseman. There’s no cure for that.”– Beatrice Horseman, Bojack Horseman
- “When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”– Valery Legasov, Chernobyl
- “To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for the truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants, it doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?”– Valery Legasov, Chernobyl
- “If a man has a conscience, he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment, as well as his prison.”– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
- “The true joy is in the mystery.”– Janet, The Good Place
- “You live only as long as the last person who remembers you.”– Akecheta, Westworld
- “It turns out life isn’t a puzzle that can be solved one time and it’s done. You wake up every day, and you solve it again.”– Chidi Anagonye, The Good Place
- “Perhaps you would have judged me for the path I took. But I’d rather live with your judgment than die with your sympathy.”– Dolores, Westworld
- “Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men’s souls out of their solitude, and spurt them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea may not die.”- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “For all his bluster, it is the sad province of man that he cannot choose his triumph. He can only choose how he will stand when the call of destiny comes, hoping that he’ll have the courage to answer.” Mohinder Suresh, Heroes
- “It’s funny, isn’t it? The things that matter? The truth is none of it matters, and the truth is it all matters tremendously. It’s a wonder any of us ever get out of bed at all. And yet, we get out of bed.”– Angela Diaz, Bojack Horseman
- “You spend your whole life thinking you’re not getting it, people aren’t giving it to you, then you realize they’re trying and you don’t even know what it is.”– Leonard, Mad Men
- “Because, if it were really like Othello, nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if it were new, it couldn’t possibly be like Othello.”- Mustapha Mond, Brave New World
- “People are peculiar creatures. All their actions are driven by desire, their characters forged by pain. As much as they may try to suppress the pain, to repress the desire, they cannot free themselves from the eternal servitude to their feelings. As long as the storm rages within them, they can find no peace. Not in life, not in death. And so, day after day, they will do all that must be done. Pain is their ship. Desire their compass… all that humans are capable of.”– Adam, Dark
- “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”– Sigmund Freud
- “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me”– Martin Niemöller
- “All in all, I think an ordinary paper company like Dunder Mifflin was a great subject for a documentary. There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?”– Pam Halpert, The Office
- “All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.”- James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
- “I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to an older fish and says: ‘I’m trying to find this thing called the ocean.’ ‘The ocean?’, the older fish says, ‘That’s what you’re in right now.’ ‘This?’, says the young fish, ‘This is water. What I want is the ocean!'”– Dorothea Williams, Soul
- “You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”– James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro
- “As I look back over a misspent life I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.”– H.L. Mencken
- “A life. A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”– Lester Freamon, The Wire
- “Middle management means that you got just enough responsibility to listen when people talk, but not so much you can’t tell anybody to go fuck themselves.” – Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin, The Wire
- “A man’s got to have a code.”– Omar Little, The Wire
- “But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”– Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
- “What about everyone else? All the other people tho whink they know what’s good?”– Jon Snow, Game of Thrones
- “Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together… he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That’s why he was lonely.“– Alan Moore, Watchmen
- “It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.”– Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
- “We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.”– Alan Moore, Watchmen
- “But at the bottom of my heart I do not believe this. I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”– James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
- “I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand — and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”– James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
- “And once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.”– James Baldwin
- “Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeteres of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.”– Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
- “It is important to remember the inconsequence of one’s talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate.”– Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power
- “And that was all they could control. Within the small and narrow frame of their own lives, all they had was their own conscience, their own story. The lessons they passed down were not about an abstract hope, an unknowable dream. They were about the power and necessity of immediate defiance.”– Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power
- “The notion that writing about race, which is to say, the force of white supremacy, is marginal and provincial is itself parcel to white supremacy, premised on the notion that the foundational crimes of this country are mostly irrelevant to its existence.”– Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power
- “But all the magic was on the page. And when I looked closely, when I began to study, I did not even see magic, so much as a machinery so elegant, so wondrous, so imaginative as to seem supernatural.”– Ta-Nehisi Coates on James Baldwin
- “I don’t ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails. I don’t ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me. After all, I am an atheist and thus do not believe anything, even a strongly held belief, is destiny. And if tragedy is to be proven wrong, if there really is hope out there, I think it can only be made manifest by remembering the cost of it being proven right. No one — not our fathers, not our police, not our gods — is coming to save us. The worst really is possible. My aim is to never be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can’t happen. And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves — just as my ancestors did.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power
- “It’s a very hard life, but it’s an honest one.”– Dr. Amani Ballour, The Cave
- “People were those who lived on my side of town. I didn’t like them all, or, in act, any of them very much, but they were people.”– Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”– Maya Angelou
- “The laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretch, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled.”– James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
- “Mais lui m’a arrêté et il voulait savoir comment je voyais cette autre vie. Alors, je lui ai crié: ‘Une vie où je pourrais me souvenir de celle-ci.'”– Albert Camus, L’étranger
- “I don’t know if any of us understand much about love. We just know we feel it when we feel it.”– Jean Milburn, Sex Education
- “What I really want to do is be a representative of my race, of the human race. I have a chance to show how kind we can be, how intelligent and generous we can be. I have a chance to teach and to love and to laugh. I know that when I finish doing what I’m sent here to do, I will be called home. And I will go without any fear, trepidations, wondering what’s gonna happen.”– Maya Angelou
- “Tell the truth, to yourself first, and to the children. Live in the present. Don’t deny the past. Know that the charge on you is to make this country more than it is today.”– Maya Angelou
- “Nothing is a line. Everything, everywhere, is always moving. Forever”– Logan Roy, Succession
- “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”– James Baldwin
- “This illusion owes everything to the great American illusion that our state is a state to be envied by other people: we are powerful, and we are rich. But our power makes us uncomfortable and we handle it very ineptly. The principal effect of our material well-being has been to set the children’s teeth on edge. If we ourselves were not so fond of this illusion, we might understand ourselves and other peoples better than we do, and be enabled to help them understand us. I am very often tempted to believe that this illusion is all that is left of the great dream that was to have become America; whether this is so or not, this illusion certainly prevents us from making America what we say we want it to be.”– James Baldwin, Nobody Knows my Name
- “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”– Audre Lorde
- “Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its heigh, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave. And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it’s one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.”– Chidi Anagonye, The Good Place
- “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “I have always had the sense of Armageddon and it was much stronger in those days, the sense of living on the edge of chaos. Not just personally, but on the world level. That we were dying, that we were killing the world – that sense had always been with me. That whatever I was doing, whatever we were doing that was creative and right, functioned to hold us from going over the edge. That this was the most we could do while we constructed some saner future.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully, it goes home, or on.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “But if you’re traveling a road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere, the ownership of that road is meaningless.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “Again, knowledge and understanding. They can function in concert, but they don’t replace each other.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- “- C’est pourtant bien, murmurai-je, de discuter avec les autres. – Oui, mais seulement si tu parles à quelqu’un capable de te répondre.”– Elena Ferrante, L’amie prodigieuse
- “Sans amour, non seulement la vie des personnes est plus pauvre, mais aussi celle des villes.”– Elena Ferrante, L’amie prodigieuse
- “Greco, la beauté que Cerullo avait dans la tête depuis l’enfance n’a pas trouvé à s’exprimer: elle a finit entièrement sur sa figure. Mais ce sont des endroits où la beauté ne dure pas, et après c’est comme si elle n’avait jamais existé.”– Elena Ferrante, L’amie prodigieuse
- “I breathe. And then begin to cry. For how terrible I feel, how disgusting. For playing, yet again, this part that feels so false and dishonest and unfair, this part that only exists because of its corollary, this part that comes at the cost of others.”– Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues
- “It doesn’t magically go away, this feeling of not being from here, that I might be asked to leave at any moment, of being trapped. I suspect it never will.”– Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues
- “To improvise makeshift lotas, to do henna, to do these things it’s taken me decades to embrace in this complicated process of unlearning that my culture and people are not inherently inferior? Who would I be without these things I love?”– Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues
- “I know what my staying entails: becoming a part of the settler colonialist project that is this country, contributing toward imperialist wars with my taxes, becoming complicit in the government-backed abuse of other marginalized people. But I want to stay. Because where would I go?”– Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues
- “Tout au long de sa vie, ce qui a le plus effrayé Lila, c’est que les gens, encore plus que les choses, pouvaient perde leurs contours et se répandre sans plus aucune forme.”– Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
- “Mais elle l’avait compris dès que j’avais surgi devant elle et à présent, risquant des ennuis avec ses collègues et des amendes, elle réagissait en m’expliquant qu’en réalité je n’avais rien gagné, que dans ce monde il n’y avait d’ailleurs rien à gagner, que sa vie était aussi débordante d’aventures surprenantes que la mienne, et que le temps ne faisait que passer, sans aucun sens: il était simplement agréable de se voir de temps en temps pour entendre la musique folle du cerveau de l’une faire écho à la musique folle du cerveau de l’autre.”– Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
- “People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.”– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
- “‘Well then,’ he continued, ‘as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place. And when I say everything,’ he added, grimly, ‘I mean all the serious, dreadful things, like pain and death and love, in which you Americans do not believe.'”– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
- “‘Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?'”– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
- “‘It’s cold,’ she said, ‘out here in the Old World.’ ‘Well, it’s pretty cold out there in the New One, too,’ I said. ‘It’s cold out here, period.'”– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
- “I cannot read what is in his eyes: if it is terror, then I have never seen terror, if it is anguish, then anguish has never laid hands on me.”– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
- “I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always, helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. I looked at Giovanni’s face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that, while what was happening to me was not so strange as it would have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief. It was not really so strange, so unprecedented, though voices deep within me boomed, For shame! For shame! that I should be so abruptly, so hideously entangled with a boy; what was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle occurring everywhere, without end, forever.”– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
- “Regarde-moi jusqu’à ce que je m’endorme. Regarde-moi toujours, même quand tu t’en vas loin de Naples. Comme ça, je sais que tu me vois, et ça m’apaise.”– Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
- “Par jeu, la nouvelle chair vive copiait l’ancienne, nous formions une chaîne d’ombres qui, depuis toujours, montaient sur scène avec la même charge d’amour, de haine, de désir et de violence.”– Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
- “J’étais partie, Elisa était restée. Que serais-je devenue si j’étais restée moi aussi, quels choix aurais-je faits?”– Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
- “Je me disais que la maturité consistait à accepter le pli qu’avait pris l’existence sans trop faire de vagues, à chercher des liens entre pratiques quotidiennes et acquis théoriques, et à apprendre à se voir et à se connaître, dans l’attente de grands changements.”– Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
- “Je me demandai quelle était la différence entre leur richesse de bourgeois et celle des Solara. Je songeai à tous les circuits secrets que suit l’argent avant de devenir de hauts salaires, de somptueux honoraires. Je me souvins d’Antonio, de Pasquale, et d’Enzo qui, tout jeunes déjà, devaient grapiller quelques lires pour survivre. Les ingénieurs, les architectes, les avocats, les banquiers, tout ça c’était autre chose: pourtant ces fortunes provenaient, à travers mille filtres, des mêmes affaires criminelles et des mêmes horreurs – quelques miettes s’étaient même transformées en pourboires pour mon père et avaient contribué à mes études. Quel était donc le seuil à partir duquel l’argent mauvais devenait bon, et vice versa?“– Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
- “Comme il était merveilleux de franchir les frontières, de se glisser dans d’autres cultures et de découvrir la nature provisoire de ce que j’avais cru être définitif!”– Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
- “C’est tellement confortable, de ne jamais se sentir perdu devant rien! Aucune plaie ne s’infecte jamais, toute blessure a ses points de suture, et aucun recoin sombre ne nous fait peur. Seulement, à un moment donné, le truc ne marche plus.”– Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
- “Soudain, je me mis à regarder la ville et surtout le quartier comme une part important de ma vie, dont non seulement je ne devais pas faire abstraction, mais qui était essentielle à la réussite de mon travail.”– Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
- “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”– James Baldwin
- “Être né dans cette ville ne sert qu’à une chose: savoir depuis toujours, presque d’instinct, ce qu’aujourd’hui tout le monde commence à soutenir avec mille nuances: le rêve du progrès sans limites est, en réalité, un cauchemar rempli de férocité et de mort.”– Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
- “Ce jour-là, je me suis dit que cette histoire pourrait continuer à l’infini, racontant tantôt les efforts de jeunes gens défavorisés qui tentaient d’améliorer leur sort en piochant des livres sur de vielles étagères, tantôt l’ensemble des bavardages enjôleurs, de promesses, de tromperies et de sang qui empêchent ma ville et le monde d’aller véritablement mieux.”– Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
- “Contrairement aux récits, la vraie vie, une fois passée, tend non pas vers la clarté mais vers l’obscurité.”– Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
- “This is real darkness. It’s not death, or war, or child molestation. Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart, Harry.”– Dolores Dei, Disco Elysium
- “There may not be, you know, as much humanity as one would like to see, but there is some. There’s more than one would think. In any case, if you break faith with what you know, that’s a betrayal of many, many, many, many people. I may know six people, but that’s enough. Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”- James Baldwin
- “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”– Charles Bukowski
- “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”– James Baldwin
- “Well, here’s what’s gonna happen. One day you’re gonna wake up, eat your breakfast, brush your teeth, go about your business. And sooner or later, you’re gonna realize you haven’t thought about it. None of it. And that’s the moment you realize you can forget. When you know that’s possible, it all gets easier.”– Mike Ehrmantraut, Better Call Saul
- “It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america’s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.”– Audre Lorde
- “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”– Isaiah 6:8
- “‘Unfortunately, I cannot show it to you,’ replied the master, ‘Because I burned it in my stove.’ ‘I’m sorry but I don’t believe you,’ said Woland, ‘You can’t have done. Manuscripts don’t burn.'”– Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
- “‘You’re not Dostoevsky,’ said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev. ‘Well, who knows, who knows,’ he replied. ‘Dostoevsky’s dead,’ said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently. ‘I protest!’ Behemoth exclaimed hotly. ‘Dostoevsky is immortal!‘”– Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
- “It’s impossible to read ‘The Fire Next Time’ and actually read ‘The Fire Next Time’ and remain the same.”– Dante Stewart, Code Switch
- “It was good enough for my mother. It was good enough for my father. It was good enough for my grandmother, Lord. It’s good enough for me.”– J.C. Howard, Code Switch
- “Those of us who nurture the lives of those children who are not supposed to exist, who are not supposed to grow up, who are revolutionary in their very beings are doing some of the most subversive work in the world. If we don’t know it, the establishment does.”– Alexis Pauline Gumbs
- “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”– Martin Luther King Jr.
- “He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. Perhaps I should not say, flatly, what I believe – that he is a great painter – among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush.”– James Baldwin on Beauford Delaney
- “Her use of language… Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny.”– James Baldwin on what he liked about Emily Dickinson
- “Baldwin was never afraid to say it in his novels, in his essays, and in his poetry – because Baldwin saw us long before we saw ourselves.”– Nikky Finney, The Three Mothers
- “They don’t really hate us. They don’t know us. How can they hate us? They mostly scared.”–Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s a good thing, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”– Toni Morrison, Beloved
- “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”– Bertolt Brecht
- “Sometimes, you dont survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can.”– Toni Morrison
- “I know it is also my father’s first time on this earth. And I know he had it worse when he was little. But I was little, too.”– Franz Kafka
- “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all of the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”– James Baldwin
- “There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.”– Octavia Butler
- “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”– Henry David Thoreau
- “There is only one question: how to love this world.”– Mary Oliver
- “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love, whether we call it friendship or family or romance, is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work, steadfast work, life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view. But there is still a clear-eyed, loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”– Maria Popova, The Marginalian
- “We’ve all been up the same streets. There aren’t a hell of a lot of streets. Only we’ve been taught to lie so much, about so many things, that we hardly ever know where we are.”– James Baldwin, Another Country
- “Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare.”– James Baldwin, Another Country
- “The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.”– James Baldwin, Another Country
- “The world is violent and mercurial – it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love – love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent, being a writer, being a painter, being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”– Tennessee Williams
- “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”– Toni Morrison
- “The role of the artist or responsibility of the artist is to make you respect that moment above all other, to recognize that there is nothing under heaven, no creed and no flag and no cause, more important than the single human life.”– James Baldwin
- “I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all of the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.”– Zora Neale Hurston
- “The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.”– Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
- “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”– Emma Goldman
- “Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”– Audre Lorde
- “But it was not feminine, either, and something in Vivaldo resisted the word androgynous. It was a quality to which great numbers of people would respond without knowing to what it was they were responding. There was great farce in the face, and great gentleness. But, as most women are not gentle, nor most men strong, it was a face which suggested, resonantly, in the depths, the truth about our natures.”– James Baldwin, Another Country
- “He stared into his cup, noting that black coffee was not black, but deep brown. Not many things in the world were really black, not even the night, not even the mines. And the light was not white, either, even the palest light held within itself some hint of its origins, in fire.”– James Baldwin, Another Country
- “Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.”– Richard Siken
- “The centre of every poem is this: I have loved you. I have had to deal with that.”– Salma Deera
- “Il ne peut s’empêcher de repenser à cette petite mendiante de Tanger. Elle aussi avait les yeux bleus et fiers, malgré son extrême pauvreté. Grandir au Maroc, c’est être forcément témoin de ce contraste cruel. Les enfants sont marqués par ce genre de rencontres. Adulte, on s’hermétise, on se raisonne, on a déjà trop accepté. Souvent, Marcos, en repensant, à la fillette tangéroise, se sent coupable de sa réussite à lui, si facile, si attendue.”– Zineb Mekouar, La Poule et Son Cumin
- “Qu’elle vive. Tout le reste, c’est de la littérature.”– Zineb Mekouar, La Poule et Son Cumin
- “It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.”– Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts, we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given. What matters is how we live.”– Jack Kornfield, in bell hooks’ All About Love
- “I am someone who thinks and feels much more than is reasonable. And that is all.”– Virginia Woolf
- “They are people who take and hold a generous and neighborly view of self-preservation; they do not believe that they can survive and flourish by the rule of dog eat dog; they do not believe that they can succeed by defeating or destroying or selling or using up everything but themselves. They doubt that good solutions can be produced by violence. They want to preserve the precious things of nature of human culture and pass them on to their children… They see that no commonwealth or community of interest can be defined by greed… They know that work ought to be necessary; it ought to be good; it ought to be satisfying and dignifying to the people who do it; and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for whom it is done.”– Wendell Berry, in bell hooks’ All About Love
- “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”– Rainer Maria Rilke
- “I wonder sometimes why do some people in this world manage to survive, while others do not? Is it those who find their shadows and those who don’t? Because a body cannot live without its shadow. Those shadows tell us where we are. Whatever it is, you and I are here. We are here.”– Sunja, Pachinko
- “My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”– Friedrich Nietzsche
- “If there were nothing else, reading would – obviously – be worth living for.”– Nuala O’Faolain
- “I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believe it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”– Ta-Nehisi Coates
- “Maybe this longing is our way of surviving.”– Mahmoud Darwish
- “Everyone keep telling me how special I am. What good is a railroad if only special folk can take it? What good is a farm full of freedom if only special folk can till it?”– Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
- “Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.”– Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
- “Maybe there are no places to escape to, only places to run from.”– Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
- “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”– Kait Rokowski
- “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”– James Baldwin
- “This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”– Carter G. Woodson
- “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”– Mary Oliver
- “Once you know who you are, you don’t have to worry anymore.”– Nikki Giovanni
- “I dream. Sometimes, I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.”– Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
- “I am amazed by how much people can survive, endure — and how they can go on living, laughing. After thorough devastation, indescribable loss, people’s hearts still beat. People can, still, live. This is perplexing, bewildering news to me. Defies sense and gravity to me. And yet. When I see people living — and we do! We do everyday! — in and through and around all kinds of circumstances, I am in love and want to know, how, how?”– Aracelis Girmay
- “There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”– James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
- “And I said to my body softly, ‘I want to be your friend.’ It took a long breath and replied, ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.'”– Nayyirah Waheed
- “It’s a nice big fat philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.”– Toni Morrison
- “Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it’s not a compelling idea. It’s predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order get anybody’s attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”– Toni Morrison
- “The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”– C.S. Lewis
- “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”- Ernest Hemingway
- “I have a huge and savage conscience that won’t let me get away with things.”– Octavia E. Butler
- “To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked. In the grip of it pleasure or pain doesn’t matter. You think what will they do, what new power will they acquire if they see me naked like this. If they see you feeling. You have no idea what. It’s not about them. To be seen is the penalty.”– Anne Carson, Red Doc
- “I will not give up the flowers in my heart for stones just because the world is a hard place. The world is only hard because it needs more flower-hearted people.”– Nikita Gill, Dragonhearts
- “The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”– Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- “The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”– Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
- “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”– James Baldwin
- “And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”– Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
- “‘There is no story that is not true’, said Uchendu. ‘The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others. We have albinos among us. Do you not think they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?’– Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.”– Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
- “I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling us what it is, I think it would exist in any case. The startle and wonder of being in this place. This overwhelming beauty – some of it is natural, some of it is man-made, some of it is casual, some of it is a mere glance – is an absolute necessity. I don’t think we can do without it any more than we can do without dreams or oxygen.”– Toni Morrison
- “If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”– George Orwell, 1984
- “The heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care.”– Emily Dickinson
- “Beyond death there are no ideals and no humbug, only reality. The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace. The most horrible sight in the world cannot put out the eye.”– Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
- “Every morning after the bath which he would have preferred cold but must have hot to stay alive (since Africa never spared those who did what they liked instead of what they had to do) […].”– Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
- “I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist’. In thousands of agonies — I exist. I’m tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either.”– Robert Graves
-
A Quiet World 