Jude > Jude's Quotes

“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“This is what I think of America -- nothing. This is what I think of American Jews -- nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism -- nothing. Your chances for survival -- none at all. You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you're over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won't give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife--who's tearing her program up into little white paper pills she'd like to swallow like Percodan--isn't merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufficiency of options for educated women in this country; it's more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn't just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it's more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that's been thrust at her--from what college to choose to what career to have--is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example--whom she's been condemned to babysit--will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, laugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils...”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“Satan, the angel who fell when he failed to get tenure.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“It's funny about love', Sophia said. 'The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.'
'That's very true,' Grandmother observed. 'And so what do you do?'
'You go on loving,' said Sophia threateningly. 'You love harder and harder.”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

“Домът е там, където са отрязали крилата ти.”
― Рене Карабаш, Остайница

“С всичко можеш да свикнеш, дори и със себе си.”
― Рене Карабаш, Остайница

“It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention–exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“We love people before we notice we love them, but the act of naming the love makes it different, drags it out into different light.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling's approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know. A person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things which happened to be true at the age of seventeen.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviours. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“As for me, I used to be a bird
with a gentle white womb,
someone cut my throat
just for laughs,
I don’t know.
As for me, I used to be a great albatross
and whirled over the seas.
Someone put an end to my journey,
without any charity in the tone of it.
But even stretched out on the ground
I sing for you now
my songs of love.”
― Alda Merini, Love Lessons: Selected Poems

“Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“Only a fool is not afraid.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Your idea of love is rather primitive. It's not a series of sensations, independent of each other...It's something different... a sense of loss...”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour tristesse

“On s’habitue aux défauts des autres quand on ne croit pas de son devoir de les corriger.”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour tristesse

“Your memory creates postcard images, but it doesn't really comprehend the world at all. That's why a landscape is so affected by the mood of the person looking at it. In it a person sees his own inner, transitory moments. Wherever he looks, he sees nothing but himself.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

“A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.”
― Mark Rothko

“Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

“I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

“And if we never slept together or otherwise 'realized' our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

“When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I’d memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

“You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.”
― Wystan Hugh Auden

“God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. –”
― W. H. Auden

“I saw a little movie of a person stroking a small bird with two Q-tips, one held between
the forefinger and thumb of each hand. It tipped back its head to receive the minor
tenderness, which to the bird must have felt like being touched by a god. For a moment
I knew what it would be to feel at the mercy of love, small-scale, the kind shown but not
spoken of.”
― Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets