Chiquita Dave > Chiquita Dave's Quotes

“I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Pilate also became, in a way, the first priest of the Eucharist of Christ. Christ offered the bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood, but Pilate offered Christ himself. He took him, showed him to the people, proclaimed him and broke him.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“Standing in the praetorium, planting the barricades of his awkward questions, Pilate becomes the prototype of every uncertain man or woman forced into a dialogue with God. He asks, only half-believing that he will ever get an answer. What comes back is elliptical, disturbing; but for a moment the heart has been laid open.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“Stunned and still not suffering. Swollen with care and anxiety and still not suffering. Useless, old and full of grief, but still not suffering.”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Ah, grief makes us precise!”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“It’s a depressing habit you have of loving to sneeze and of eating apples as if they were juicier for you and being the first one to exclaim how good the movie is. You depress people. We like apples too.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“if I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry—sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“A more truthful dust jacket would say that the author, after much floundering, went to college and worked like the drones he'd once despised, kept reasonable hours, learned to be alone in a room, learned to throw stuff out, learned to keep gnawing the same bone until it cracked. It would say that the author lived more like a banker than an outlaw and that his deepest pleasures were familial—hearing his wife sing as she worked in the garden, unzipping her dress after a party; seeing his most solemn child laugh at something he said. The brief years of friendship with his father before he died, never once allowing that his son had anything to be pardoned for.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give. ”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our better journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Good night, Ai" said the alien, and the other alien said, "Good night, Harth.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“How did you get all this?” “Stole it,” said the one-time prime minister of Karhide,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven