Anna Biller > Anna's Quotes

“She stared into the flames, resigning herself to her fate. She now knew that she had fallen victim to a sociopath, and yet she didn’t care. No man is perfect; all men have their flaws, and you have to accept the bad with the good. Some men expect you to mother them, or make you into their maid. Others ignore you, or lecture you, or misunderstand everything you say, or are fussy about trivial things. A bad man can kill you with a knife, but a good man can kill you by boring you to death!”
― Anna Biller, Bluebeard's Castle

“For the first time in her life she wanted to be merged with another, to be carried away by voluptuousness, to be inside of the sublime. She looked into his eyes, and his irises were blank projection screens into which she poured all of her longing.”
― Anna Biller, Bluebeard's Castle

“He hoisted her up in his strong arms, and she opened her eyes and looked up at him adoringly. She thought that the image must have carried a certain eerie romantic charm, like Dracula carrying off his victim.”
― Anna Biller, Bluebeard's Castle

“There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly. ”
― Boris Vian

“One may cover over secret actions, but to be silent on what all the world knows, and things which have had effects which are public and of so much consequence is an inexcusable defect.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“The secret of "Bluebeard" is that there is no secret.”
― Jack Zipes

“The secret of "Bluebeard" is that there is no secret.”
― Jack D. Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre

“She believes Marianne lacks “warmth,” by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“But for birds and above all mammals, the male imposes himself on her; very often she submits to him with indifference or even resists him. Whether she is provocative or consensual, it is he who takes her: she is taken. The word often has a very precise meaning: either because he has specific organs or because he is stronger, the male grabs and immobilizes her; he is the one that actively makes the coitus movements; for many insects, birds, and mammals, he penetrates her. In that regard, she is like a raped interiority.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“His father saw him off. Demon had dyed his hair a blacker black. He wore a diamond ring blazing like a Caucasian ridge. His long, black, blue-ocellated wings trailed and quivered in the ocean breeze. Lyudi oglyadïvalis’ (people turned to look). A temporary Tamara, all kohl, kabesk rouge, and flamingo-boa, could not decide what would please her demon lover more—just moaning and ignoring his handsome son or acknowledging bluebeard’s virility in morose Van, who could not stand her Caucasian perfume, Granial Maza, seven dollars a bottle.”
― Nabokov Vladimir, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“The main favor I ask of the serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost truthfulness and perception.”
― Nabokov Vladimir

“He turned off the canoreo and helped himself to the brandy stored behind a sliding panel, drinking from the bottle, because all three glasses were filthy. He felt surrounded by crashing great trees, and the monstrous beasts of unachieved, perhaps unachievable tasks. One such task was Ada whom he knew he would never give up; to her he would surrender the remnants of his self at the first trumpet blast of destiny. Another was his philosophic work, so oddly impeded by his own virtue—by that originality of literary style which constitutes the only real honesty of a writer. He had to do it his own way, but the cognac was frightful, and the history of thought bristled with clichés, and it was that history he had to surmount.”
― Nabokov Vladimir, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“Finally, when we recall that in those days a court jester would often assume the name of his master, with only a slight change in the ending, the picture becomes complete. We have thus the interesting figure of this Italian or Italianate jester haunting the halls of a Northern castle, a man in his forties, but as alert as he was in his youth twenty years ago when he replaced Yorick. Whereas Polonius had been the father of good news, Claudio is the uncle of bad news.”
― Nabokov Vladimir, Bend Sinister

“When discussing Madame Bovary—the book and the lady herself—I shall use romantic in the following sense: "characterized by a dreamy, imaginative habit of mind tending to dwell on picturesque possibilities derived mainly from literature." A romantic person, mentally and emotionally living in the unreal, is profound or shallow depending on the quality of his or her mind.”
― Nabokov Vladimir

“There were no tender young girls present, the type Byron detested, like fruits that look ripe but upon tasting are sour and unready—none of those early spring growths; instead, all the women there were splendid...”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“Every day, every instant, all this around me laughs, gleams, begs to be looked at, to be loved. The world stands like a dog pleading to be played with.”
― Vladimir Nabokov , King, Queen, Knave

“Let us discuss crime, crime as an art; and card tricks. I am greatly worked up just at present. Oh, Conan Doyle! How marvelously you could have crowned your creation when your two heroes began boring you! What an opportunity, what a subject you missed! For you could have written one last tale concluding the whole Sherlock Holmes epic; one last episode beautifully setting off the rest: the murderer in that tale should have turned out to be not the one-legged bookkeeper, not the Chinaman Ching and not the woman in crimson, but the very chronicler of the crime stories, Dr. Watson himself—Watson, who, so to speak, knew what was Whatson. A staggering surprise for the reader.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

“Let us suppose, I kill an ape. Nobody touches me. Suppose it is a particularly clever ape. Nobody touches me. Suppose it is a new ape—a hairless, speaking species. Nobody touches me. By ascending these subtle steps circumspectly, I may climb up to Leibnitz or Shakespeare and kill them, and nobody will touch me, as it is impossible to say where the border was crossed, beyond which the sophist gets into trouble.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

“That drab vegetation could not satisfy me.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

“An author’s fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Despair