Quote collection
520 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings...As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects."
"I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease."
"In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night-- his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell."
"Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same."
"We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds."
"Balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one's self."
"If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way."
"Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity."
"Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it."
"All unlived emotions turn to inanity."
"To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you."
"Introspection is a devouring monster."
"The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves."
"Jazz is the music of the body."
"Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark."
"The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well."
"I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals."
"The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned."
"I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern."
"If one's conscious life is too rigid, too regimented, then the surface may crack at times, and we are unprepared for the strange emotions or sensations we experience."