By Category: Other People

“Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.”

-Gone With The Wind [movie]

Recommended by saskatchewanpirate.

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“I felt like a spy. The camera had caught them in the middle of a smile, in the middle of the day, in the middle of their lives. They were looking into the lens for each other and themselves. Could they have imagined that a girl like me, hungry and feverish, would drink in the details of their privacy, so many years after they were gone? I knew how it had ended for them. but I wanted not to know because they didn't know it themselves. It made the pictures so sad. I felt like some dwarfed and fallen god who could create nothing and change nothing, but could predict their fate with cruel certainty. I could point to each of them and say, You will die of consumption in your twenty-ninth year. You will marry a man you do not love and never have children. You will drink yourself insane. You will live well into your nineties and neither of your daughters will forgive you -- you will die alone. The sorrows that were set to happen to them had already happened. I knew what was coming, and like a train wreck that couldn't be stopped, I wanted to cover my eyes so I wouldn't see the smoke and the burning.”

-Color is the Suffering of Light, Melissa Green

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“And suddenly Deborah knew what was good about the D ward: no more lying gentility or need to live according to the incomprehensible rules of Earth. When the blindness came, or the hard knots of pain from the nonexistent tumor, or the Pit, no one would say. 'What will people think!' 'Be ladylike,' or 'Don't make a fuss!'”

-I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg

Recommended by drenchedinwine.

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“Everybody is so afraid of getting blood on the living room floor. 'I can't stand to see suffering,' they say, 'so go die outside!'”

-I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg

Recommended by Shay.

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“I made love to her in those days savagely as though I hated her, but what I hated was the future. Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night. She didn't change; she cooked for me, she made my pipes, she gently and sweetly laid out her body for my pleasure (but it was no longer a pleasure), and just as in those early days I wanted her mind, now I wanted to read her thoughts, but they were hidden away in a language I couldn't speak.”

-The Quiet American, Graham Greene

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“She searched me carefully, as with a scene on is asked to memorize; that is, as if she might never see me again. 'Thank you for a pleasant walk, Asgar.'

'It was pleasant.'

'Yes.'

'I'm grateful you could come Alice.'

'It's been nice.'

Dull, ordinary words for people who want the moment to die. And perhaps, I did. It was too awful to think that I had preserved my heart so long ago and that now, years later, I had stuck it in my chest, smelling of formaldehyde, and found it too sorry and shriveled to work. But it's a common tale. Isn't there a statue, in Shakespeare, of a long-dead queen who comes to life before the eyes of her mourning king? The king rejoices and repents, but what does he do the next day? Does he remember how she sang off-key as she brushed her hair, how she screeched at servants?”

-The Confessions of Max Tivoli, A.S. Greer

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“I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself. ”

-Sickened, Julie Gregory

Recommended by Shay.

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“Please bleed
So I know that you are real
So I know that you can feel
The damage that you've done
Who have I become
To myself I am numb, I am numb, I am numb.”

-Please Bleed, Ben Harper

Recommended by Kate.

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“Even now I prowl through people's houses. Arriving for a party, I hang my coat in the closet and glance at the shelf above the pole, wondering: what's in those boxes? Upstairs to wash my hands and look in the medicine cabinet. Dental floss and Jolen cream bleach for facial hair. A prescription for tetracycline, one for antifungal ointment. Nothing shameful- no Valium, Xanax, or worse, Prozac. These people aren't anxious or depressed. They have sinus infections and athlete's foot. They don't spend the minutes between waking and showering reciting reasons not to kill themselves.

I suspect that people from unhappy families are always searching the cupboards and drawers of happy people. Sliding a hand between the neat stacks of towels in the linen closet, slipping a finger under the hinged lid of a jewel box, flipping furtively through the pages of a book. They are looking everywhere. As if, perhaps, out might fall a list, an outline, the formula for how they do it.”

-Exposure, Kathryn Harrison

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“When I am right, no one remembers. When I am wrong, no one forgets.”

-Doug Harvey

Recommended by Alyssa.

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“Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable.”

-Amanda Heggs, AIDS sufferer

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“Often it is the most deserving people
who cannot help loving
those who destroy them.”

-Gertrude, Hermann Hesse

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“She came, that day, alone and dreamingly up the hill toward me. She had not seen me and the sight of her approaching filled me with apprehension and suspense. I saw her hair, tied in two thick plaits, with loose strands on either side, her cheeks blown by the wind. I saw for the first time in my life how beautiful she was, and how beautiful and dreamlike the play of the wind in her delicate hair, how beautiful and provocative the fall of her thin blue dress over her young limbs; and just as the bitter spice of the chewed bud coursed through me with the whole dread pleasure and pain of spring, so the sight of the girl filled me with the whole deadly foreboding of love, the foreboding of woman.”

-Harry's Loves, Herman Hesse

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“Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.”

-Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

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“A meeting between two people who complete each other, who are made for each other, borders already, in my opinion, on a miracle.”

-Adolf Hitler

Recommended by J.

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“By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell -- and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.”

-Adolf Hitler

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“How lucky for rulers that men do not think.”

-Adolf Hitler

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“I thought about how the Boy with No Fear had played cards with the dead, how he'd grinned and thrown an ace on the table, how he'd walked through graveyards without a single shiver, how he knew death from the inside out. I wanted a man like that, one it was impossible to kill, who wouldn't flinch if you wished him dead, who'd already been there and back.”

-The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

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“My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You're so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I knew you'd leave.”

-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

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“Here's the thing about Maureen: She had a lot more guts that I had. She'd stuck around to find out what it would feel like, never to live the life she had planned for herself. I didn't know what those plans were, but she had them, same as everybody, and when Matty came along, she'd waited around for twenty years to see what she'd offered as a replacement, and she was offered nothing at all. There was a lot of feeling in that slap, and I could imagine hitting people pretty hard when I was her age, too. That was one of the reasons I didn't intend ever to be her age.”

-A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

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“You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are not sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?”

-High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

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“I stopped watching, turned away from the alley. Something warm was running down my wrist. I blinked, I saw I was still biting down on my fist, hard enough to draw blood from the knuckles. I realized something else. I was weeping. From just around the corner, I could hear Assef's quick, rhythmic grunts.

I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan--the way he'd stood up for me all those times in the past--and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run.

In the end, I ran.

I ran because I was a coward. I was afraid of Assef and what he would do to me. I was afraid of getting hurt. That's what I told myself as I turned my back to the alley, to Hassan. That's what I made myself believe. I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right: Nothing was free in the world in the world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba. Was it a fair price? The answer floated to my conscious mind before I could thwart it: He was just a Hazara, wasn't he?”

-The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

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“Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

-Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

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“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

-Aldous Huxley

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“She's not like that. It's like she doesn't need other people to define who she is. She knows.”

-If These Walls Could Talk 2 [television movie]

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