Quotes By Letter: E
“If you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistently, they then have nothing left except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming around in the gut, but so far down, so hidden, it's impossible to find.”
-Martha Barnes, David Edgar
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“Gets to a point where you really can't operate any more as a human being - you can't get out of bed, you can't... make yourself a cup of coffee without something going badly wrong or your body's too weak to walk. ”
-Richey James Edwards
Recommended by Shay.
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“Self-mutilation is a very different issue to suicide. It is a controlled pain personal to you, allowing you to live/exist to some degree.”
-Richey James Edwards
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“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
-Albert Einstein
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“To see with one's own eyes, to feel and judge without succumbing to the suggestive power of the fashion of the day, to be able to express what one has seen and felt in a snappy sentence or even in a cunningly wrought word - is that not glorious? Is it not a proper subject for congregation?”
-Albert Einstein
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“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
-Albert Einstein
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“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
-What I Believe, Albert Einstein
Recommended by kimmysue.
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“There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.”
-Felix Holt, George Eliot
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“My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.”
-A Song For Simeon, T.S. Eliot
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“It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.”
-After Strange Gods, T.S. Eliot
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“Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious
of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the
waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
dancing.”
-East Coker, T.S. Eliot
~
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
-Little Gidding V, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
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“THEY are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me 5
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.”
-Morning at the Window, T.S. Eliot
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“Birth, and copulation, and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks;
Birth, copulation and death.”
-Sweeney Agonistes, T.S. Eliot
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“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
-The Cocktail Party, T.S. Eliot
Recommended by Meghan.
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“There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish - which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.”
-The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, T.S. Eliot
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“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
-The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot
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“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.”
-The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
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“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this and I have countless times, in just about every act I've committed and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing...”
-American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
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“...where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire-meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...”
-American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
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“I'm having a sort of hard time paying attention because my automated teller has started speaking to me, sometimes actually leaving weird messages on the screen, in green lettering, like 'Cause a Terrible Scene at Sotheby's' or 'Kill the President' or 'Feed Me a Stray Cat,' and I was freaked out by the park bench that followed me for six blocks last Monday evening and it too spoke to me.”
-American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
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“When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time. Well, now I've been trying to look through myself, and there's risk in it. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied--not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to 'justify' and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.”
-Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
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“My male friends disdained my taste in women. Movie stars and fashion models left me bored. I dug career women in business attire. I dug that one skirt seam about to pop from 15 extra pounds. I didn't fall for the ones with perfect shapes and pert faces. I loved the smiles that didn't quite work and the sad eyes that couldn't lie. Mismatched features and oddly shaped breasts hit me hard. I was looking for sexual and psychological gravity.”
-My Dark Places, James Ellroy
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“The only thing that separates a poet from madness is a thin sheet of paper.”
-Elsa
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“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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