Books Quotes

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

It's so clear to me now: the memorizing of a fake prayer, the symbolization of objects, the struggle to relate to the invisible - I needed a religion. I was lost.

~ Sloane Crosley

Perhaps if I'd had God in my life growing up I would have been able to understand the total and complete unfairness of the universe rewarding mean girls

~ Sloane Crosley

There is a point in most abusive relationships when it occurs to the beaten party that they are guilty of putting their face in the way of someone else's fist.

~ Sloane Crosley

So natural and universal is a child's curiosity about sex and so long are we conscious of it before we do it, that our original impressions of it leave an indelible mark.

~ Sloane Crosley

Why do people always want to put their hands on vulnerability? I sped up.

~ Sloane Crosley

I have never pictured my own wedding. I do want to get married. It's a nice idea. Though I think husbands are like tattoos - you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life.

~ Sloane Crosley

It seemed that having girlfriends was a sign of innocence and a boundless capacity to care about other women. The hearts in that photograph and multiple strings attached to multiple other hearts. Everything was less about cliché and more about camaraderie. We weren't out for ourselves, we were out for each other. When had I forgotten that? When had I cut the pink wire?

~ Sloane Crosley

The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.

~ Anthony Burgess

Weddings are friendship deal breakers if the friendship is weak. There are too many favors, too many tasks, too much required devotion and Aqua Net for imposters like me. I tried to make eye contact with Francine, to give her a knowing good-bye smile like a ghost of a loved one in a movie. It was no usue, I decided to cut my final pink wire. There would be no more yearly happy birthdays and certainly no more bonding with the girl in the duct tape dress. That ship had sailed.

~ Sloane Crosley

love is not boastful. But hate? Apparently hate has a big mouth.

~ Sloane Crosley

I thought of the past and how one should have respect for it, like the elderly.

~ Sloane Crosley

It should be noted that my mother has a long history of being disturbingly unperturbed by what normal people deem perturbing. Certain things simply don't strike her as worthy of a sit-down.

~ Sloane Crosley

Teddy bears are best because they understand it's nice to be alone.

~ Sloane Crosley

Even a person like this makes mistakes, can't always hold on to everything they'd like to,can't always force the world to spin in the direction of their choosing. You'll hug him longer than necessary and tell him to keep in touch. And you'll know, finally, that it had nothing to do with you.

~ Sloane Crosley

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.

~ Susan Sontag

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.

~ Susan Sontag

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

~ Susan Sontag

When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.

~ Anthony Burgess

And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.

~ Anthony Burgess

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

~ Susan Sontag

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to care more.

~ Susan Sontag