Miss Sasaki went back to her office and sat down at her desk. She was quite far from the windows, which were off to her left, and behind her were a couple of tall bookcases containing all the books of the factory library, which the personnel department had organized. She settled herself at her desk, put some things in a drawer, and shifted papers. She thought that before she began to make entries in her lists of new employees, discharges, and departures for the Army, she would chat for a moment with the girl at the right. Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light. She was paralyzed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment (the plant was 1,600 yards from the center).
Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 09:12 — GabrielleWho Said It?:John HerseySource:Hiroshima
Link to full quote: Quote #2502 from Hiroshima by John Hersey.
However happy we may be with our partner, our love for them necessarily prevents us [unless with live in a polygamous society] from starting other romantic liaisons. But why should this constrain us if we truly loved them? Why should we feel this as a loss unless our love for them has already begun to wane? The answer perhaps lies in the uncomfortable thought that in resolving our need to love, we may not always succeed in resolving our need to long.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 08:37 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Alain de BottonSource:On Love
Link to full quote: Quote #2501 from On Love from Alain de Botton.
To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 08:24 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Henry MillerSource:Sexus
Link to full quote: Quote #2500 from Sexus by Henry Miller.
It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 07:58 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Primo LeviSource:Survival in Auschwitz
Link to full quote: Quote #2499 from Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.
You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 07:54 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Ernest HemingwaySource:A Moveable Feast
Link to full quote: Quote #2498 from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.
She looks at me and says, Perhaps you'll escape. Day and night, this obsession. It's not that you have to achieve anything, it's that you have to get away from where you are.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 07:44 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Marguerite DurasSource:The Lover
Link to full quote: Quote #2497 from The Lover by Marguerite Duras.
Perfection is static, and I am in full progress.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 07:38 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Anaïs NinSource:Henry and June
Link to full quote: Quote #2496 from Henry and June by Anaïs Nin.
...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 07:35 — GabrielleWho Said It?:William FaulknerSource:As I Lay Dying
Link to full quote: Quote #2495 from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.
The photo has been cut; a third of it has been cut off. In the lower left corner there's a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass. It's the hand of the other one, the one who is always in the picture whether seen or not. The hand that will set things down.
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next--if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions--you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Drowned now--the tree as well, the sky, the wind, the clouds. All she has left is the picture. Also the story of it.
The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
Submitted on Friday, March 5, 2010 - 07:29 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Margaret AtwoodSource:The Blind Assassin
Link to full quote: Quote #2494 from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.
She had waited until her husband and children were far away, and had driven into the snowy woods, and ended it. Just let it all go.
She had wanted the pain to stop. The heart-hurt. She slept her way into death, only waking when the Highway Patrol found her body.
She was cold, rigid, frozen, when they found her.
Someone like that, said the patrolwoman. You'd think she'd have everything to live for.
She tried to speak, to tell them that that was what made the pain unbearable but, like someone caught in a bad dream, she could not make herself heard. She screamed, and no sound came out. She watched as they took her body away.
She sat by the side of the road, in the snow, all bodiless and afraid, waiting for the happiness to start.
Submitted on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 01:52 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Neil Gaiman
Link to full quote: Quote #2493 from The Sandman: Endless Nights - 4. Despair - Fifteen Portraits of Despair by Neil Gaiman.
“I try to make new friends, but I don’t know how it works. I was such a recluse for so long. I took Prozac, and it worked for a year, and then it stopped. I think I did more that year, but I lost it.” He looked at me curiously. He was sad and sweet-natured and intelligent – clearly a lovely person, as someone said to him that evening – but he was gone. “How do you meet people, besides here?” And before I could answer, he added, “And once you’ve met them, what do you talk about?”
Submitted on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 01:15 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Andrew Solomon
Link to full quote: Quote #2492 from The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Submitted on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 00:59 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Kurt VonnegutSource:Bluebeard
Link to full quote: Quote #2491 from Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.
Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand--"non-being." Every day includes much more non-being than being. Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in "being." It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; my head was relieved of the pressure of writing about Roger; I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shared as I like--there were the willows, I remember, all plummy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book--the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette--which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both...
Submitted on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 00:46 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Virginia WoolfSource:A Sketch of the Past
Link to full quote: Quote #2490 from A Sketch of the Past by Virginia Woolf.
The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object. Bleeding and trembling with weariness as he was, he felt that nothing was beyond his power, and when he flung himself upon the living Death, the eternal Surd in the universal mathematic, he was astonished, and yet (on a deeper level) not astonished at all, at his own strength. His arms seemed to move quicker than his thought. His hands taught him terrible things. He felt its ribs break, he heard its jaw-bone crack. The whole creature seemed to be crackling and splitting under his blows. His own pains, where it tore him, somehow failed to matter. He felt that he could so fight, so hate with a perfect hatred, for a whole year.
Submitted on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 00:15 — GabrielleWho Said It?:C.S. LewisSource:Perelandra
Link to full quote: Quote #2489 from Perelandra by C.S. Lewis.
"You are quick for what you are," he said, "but slow, I think, for what you were. It is said that love makes men swift and women slow. I will catch you at last if you love much more."
Submitted on Friday, February 26, 2010 - 20:52 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Peter S. BeagleSource:The Last Unicorn
Link to full quote: Quote #2488 from The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.
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