By Category: Other People
“The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land. She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da Gama or Mungo Park. For hours she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe; she would follow with her finger the elegant structure of her rib-cage, where the heart fluttered under the flesh like a bird under a blanket, and she would draw down the long line from breast-bone to navel (which was a mysterious cavern or grotto), and she would rasp her palms against her bud-wing shoulderblades. And then she would writhe about, clasp herself, laughing, sometimes doing cartwheels and handstands out of sheer exhilaration at the supple surprise of herself now she no longer a little girl.”
-The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter
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“True, we have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honors, and power, their crimes are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see–and history, as you know, is my business–everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious foodstuffs, such as bread crusts, ham, or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobium, the automatic dishonor, and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offense is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community.”
-Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
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“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”
-The High Window, Raymond Chandler
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“The day before I had met the nuns of the Santa Maria Auxiliadora Convent on their Saturday coach outing to the penguin colony on Cabo Virgenes. A bus-load of virgins. Eleven thousand virgins. About a million penguins. Black and white. Black and white. Black and white.”
-In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin
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“It's like when you are excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means that you're happy too.”
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
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“Nenny and I don't look like sisters... not right away. Not the way you can tell with Rachel and Lucy who have the same fat popsicle lips like everybody else in their family. But me and Nenny, we are more alike than you would know. Our laughter for example. Not the shy ice cream bells' giggle of Rachel and Lucy's family, but all of a sudden and surprised like a pile of dishes breaking. And other things I can't explain.
One day we were passing a house that looked, in my mind, like houses I had seen in Mexico. I don't know why. There was nothing about the house that looked exactly like the houses I remembered. I'm not even sure why I thought it, but it seemed to feel right.
Look at that house, I said, it looks like Mexico.
Rachel and Lucy look at me like I'm crazy, but before they can let out a laugh, Nenny says: Yes, that's Mexico all right. That's what I was thinking exactly.”
-The House On Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
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“No matter what you do or say, there's nothing that you can do to make people understand you.”
-Kurt Cobain
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“She was only seventeen
And forced to blame it on herself
As she hides away to tame the pain she feels
She was thrown to a scene
A drunken man without a will
And a god that makes mistakes
And still pretends
---
She was only trying to breathe
Her broken nails had sliced his skin
As he bruised her face she fades away again
When she came to at the scene
A fevered wind and a match in hand
As she watched the flames she felt alive again”
-Sad Happy, Cold
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“You can say what you mean
But it won't change a thing
I'm sick of the secrets
Stood on the edge, tied to the noose
And you came along and you cut me loose.”
-Amsterdam, Coldplay
Recommended by Eleri.
~
“He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites - and escapes.”
-Victory, Joseph Conrad
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“The Architect, by the relationships which he creates he wakes in us profound echoes, he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world, he determines the various movements of our heart and of our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty.”
-Le Corbusier
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“Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.”
-Generation X, Douglas Coupland
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“He embodies to me all of the people of my own generation who used all that was good in themselves just to make money; who use their votes for short-term gain. Who ended up blissful in the bottom-feeding jobs—marketing, land flipping, ambulance chasing, and money brokering. Such smugness. They saw themselves as eagles building mighty nests of oak branches and bulrushes, when instead they were really more like the eagles here in California, the ones who built their nests from tufts of abandoned auto parts looking like sprouts picked off a sandwich—rusted colonic mufflers and herniated fan belts—gnarls of freeway flotsam from the bleached grass meridians of the Santa Monica cheap, vulgar, toxic items that will either decompose in minutes or remain essentially unchanged until our galaxy goes supernova.”
-Generation X, Douglas Coupland
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“I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.”
-Generation X, Douglas Coupland
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“Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but tucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.”
-Girlfriend In A Coma, Douglas Coupland
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“.. how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?”
-Life After God, Douglas Coupland
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“I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older, as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.”
-Life After God, Douglas Coupland
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“i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.”
-Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond, ee cummings
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“nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”
-Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond, ee cummings
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“Sally gets out of the store as quickly as she can, marches toward the subway at Sixty-eighth. She'd like to come home with a gift for Clarissa, but can't imagine what. She'd like to tell Clarissa something, something important, but can't get it phrased. 'I love you' is easy enough. 'I love you' has become almost ordinary, being said not only on anniversaries and birthdays but spontaneously, in bed or at the kitchen sink or even in cabs... Sally and Clarissa are not stingy with their affections, and that of course is good, but now Sally finds that she wants to go home and say something more, something that extends not only beyond the sweet and the comforting but beyond passion itself... If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not, exactly, survive. She will not be all right. What she wants to say has not only to do with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half. She can bear the thought of her own death but cannot bear the thought of Clarissa's.”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
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“She always surprises you this way, by knowing more than you think she does. Louis wonders if they're calculated, these little demonstrations of self-knowledge that pepper Clarissa's wise, hostessy performance. She seems, at times, to have read your thoughts. She disarms you by saying, essentially, I know what you're thinking and I agree, I'm ridiculous. I'm far less than I could have been and I'd like it to be otherwise but I can't seem to help myself. You find that you move, almost against your will, from being irritated with her to consoling her, helping her back into her performance so that she can be comfortable again and you can resume feeling irritated.”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
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“Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed?”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
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“I could never get your attention
I could never please you
The verses are wasted on words you won't relate to
On words you'll never hear.”
-The Rhyme Scheme, Cursive
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“Conformists look around and follow closely; Nonconformists look around and do the opposite. Individualists don't look around a lot.”
-Eromon D'Alyzala
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“Damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive.”
-Damage [movie]
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