All Quotes

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. 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. But 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.”

-Apple

~

“And I'll be your girl, if you say it's a gift
And you give me some more of your drugs
Yeah, I'll be your pet, if you just tell me it's a gift
Cuz I'm tired of whys, choking on whys,
Just need a little because, because
I let the beast in and then;
I even tried forgiving him, but it's too soon
So I'll fight again, again, again, again, again.”

-Fast As You Can, Fiona Apple

~

“And you can use my skin
To bury secrets in.”

-I Know, Fiona Apple

~

“Hunger hurts, but starving works,
When it costs too much to love
And I went crazy again today,
Looking for a strand to climb
Looking for a little hope.”

-Paper Bag, Fiona Apple

~

“I was staring at the sky, just looking for a star
To pray on, or wish on, or something like that
I was having a sweet fix of a daydream of a boy.”

-Paper Bag, Fiona Apple

~

“You have no idea what I can do.”

-Apt Pupil [movie]

~

“Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble.”

-Arabic Parable

~

“Diseases are natural phenomena, and everything natural is imperfect and can somehow be fought and overcome. But AIDS is a perfect illness because it is so alien to human nature and has as its function to destroy life in the most cruel and systematic way. Never before has such a formidable calamity affected mankind. Such diabolic perfection makes one ponder the possibility that human beings may have had a hand in its creation.”

-Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas

~

“There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.”

-Aristotle

~

“Anyone here had a go at themselves
for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists
with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark
at the back, listen hard. Those at the front
in the know, those of us who have, hands up,
let's show that inch of lacerated skin
between the forearm and the fist. Let's tell it
like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark
round the tub, a yard of lint, white towels
washed a dozen times, still pink. Tough luck.
A passion then for watches, bangles, cuffs.
A likely story: you were lashed by brambles
picking berries from the woods. Come clean, come good,
repeat with me the punch line 'Just like blood'
when those at the back rush forward to say
how a little love goes a long long long way.”

-I Say I Say I Say, Simon Armitage

Recommended by Sebastian Kafka.

~

“I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.”

-Antonin Artaud

~

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”

-On Suicide, Antonin Artaud

~

“There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”

-Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, Antonin Artaud

~

“I guess I live up in my head
I call you up but my phone is dead
And now it's too much
The doctor said I need a cure
But what I got he's not really sure
And I won't say much.”

-You Are The Dark, Joseph Arthur

Recommended by Shay.

~

“I'm up all night against my will
My medicine won't let me feel anything at all
The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one
Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone.”

-You Are The Dark, Joseph Arthur

Recommended by Shay.

~

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition thats troublesome.”

-Isaac Asimov

~

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”

-LIFE magazine, Isaac Asimov

~

“I wear my scars like the rings on a pimp.”

-Godlovesugly, Atmosphere

Recommended by mel.

~

“Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do.”

-Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

~

“The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend—a madman, say—lies, perhaps, merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.”

-Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

~

“The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.”

-Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

~

“Unrequited love, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I had to see the advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meager, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions. In the world of stark physical reality it might call for the removal of my ill-fitting garments (in the dark or the bathroom, if possible: no woman wants a man to see her safety pins), but it left undisturbed metaphysical counterparts. My Plutonic vision of myself resembled an Egyptian mummy, a mysteriously wrapped object that might or might not fall into dust if uncovered. But unrequited love demanded no stripteases.”

-Hair Jewellery, Margaret Atwood

~

“Madness is private... Madness is only an amplification of what you already are”

-Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

~

“Reverie intrudes at intervals.

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes, each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoiced. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him, finish with that endless, useless longing. At the very least, daily time and the entropy of her own body should take care of it- wear her threadbare, wear her out, erase that place in her brain. But no exorcism has been enough, nor has she tried very hard at it. Exorcism is not what she wants. She wants that terrified bliss, like falling out of an airplane by mistake. She wants his famished look.

The last time she'd seen him, when they'd gone back to his room- it was like drowning: everything darkened and roared, but at the same time it was very silvery, and slow, and clear.

This is what it means, to be in thrall.”

-The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

~

“Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he have made such light of it? Sneered, even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they said once, but we reversed that, and love, like Heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. ”

-The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

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