How Quotes (page 242)
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I can identify with other people and situations, but I tend not to. I would rather recall things from my own life, and I don't have to force myself. . . . Just being in certain environments triggers a response in my brain, a certain feeling I want to articulate. For some reason, I am attracted to self-destruction. I know that personal sacrifice has a great deal to do with how we live or don't live our lives.
Bob Dylan
We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too.
Luigi Pirandello
-We live in Rome, he says, turning his face to the room again,-Caligula's Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers every morning. The masses, the fetid masses, he says, bringing all his weight to his feet.-How can they even suspect a self who can do more, when they live under absolutely no obligation. There are so few beautiful things in the world...
William Gaddis
The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent. It is constantly the same order, constantly the same revolutions; he has not sense enough to feel surprise at the sight of the greatest wonders; and it is not in his mind we must look for that philosophy, which man must have to know how to observe once, what he has every day seen." Jean Jacques Rousseau, On the Inequality among Mankind, Ch. 1, 20.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory of all he had been through, and of how much he had changed. He was closer now to the ruined battlefields and this fly-infested truck, to the nine sweet potatoes in the sack below the driver's seat, even in a sense to the detention center, than he...
J. G. Ballard
But, hell, I wouldn't have grudged him your body. I know how little bodies mean - especially women's bodies. But I do grudge him your heart and your dear, hard, unscrupulous mind. He doesn't want your mind, the fool, and I don't want your body. I can buy women cheap. But I do want your mind and your heart, and I'll never have them.
Margaret Mitchell
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions. Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy". I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
Jeffrey Eugenides