Book Quotes Quotes

His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?

~ Anaïs Nin

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

~ Susan Sontag

No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies...

~ Anaïs Nin

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

~ Susan Sontag

No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

~ Susan Sontag

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.

~ Anaïs Nin

You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.

~ Anthony Burgess

Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: I don't understand

~ Anaïs Nin

The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.

~ Anaïs Nin

Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.

~ Anaïs Nin

It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.

~ Susan Sontag

These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization.

~ Anaïs Nin

Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.

~ Anaïs Nin

Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.

~ Anaïs Nin

I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn...

~ Anaïs Nin

No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.

~ Anaïs Nin

But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom...

~ Anaïs Nin

We - this we is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.

~ Susan Sontag

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.

~ Susan Sontag

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.

~ Susan Sontag

Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.

~ Anaïs Nin

No privacy left. No manners.

~ Anaïs Nin

I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.

~ Anaïs Nin

Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.

~ Anaïs Nin

Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.

~ Anaïs Nin

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.

~ Susan Sontag

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.

~ Susan Sontag

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

~ Susan Sontag

He failed to see that it contained at once all of Djuna's wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for understanding.

~ Anaïs Nin

What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?

~ Anaïs Nin

It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.

~ Susan Sontag

He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a member of his ideals.

~ Anaïs Nin

One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.

~ Susan Sontag

You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen.

~ Anthony Burgess

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

~ Susan Sontag

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.

~ Susan Sontag

Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say.

~ Anthony Burgess

The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress.

~ Anthony Burgess

And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.

~ Anthony Burgess

The real proof that I have tried to love and that people have tried to love me back was never going to fit in a kitchen drawer.

~ Sloane Crosley