Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.
Loving someone is a loss of freedom – but one doesn’t think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
Eating is never so simple as hunger.
Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.
You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.
Tears are a form of communication – like speech – and require a listener.
I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, ‘the absentminded professor-’ They screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe.
We’re programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You’re supposed to work and suffer – and the trouble is: you believe it.
There’s nothing good about being ordinary. People don’t respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don’t run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity.
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. – Tennessee Williams.
You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependent on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weakness and then you despise him for being human.
I could become servile, cloying, saccharinely sweet: the whole package of lies that passes in the world as femininity.
As long as women are denied the priesthood, we will try to make our own rituals at our own kitchen altars and we will sew our own magical capes at our own sewing machines.
When women have so absorbed the disease of sexism that they themselves can inflict it on each other, we clearly have a perfect, self-replenishing machine for the continuation of sexism. Unable to turn our assertiveness against men, we turn it against each other. Thus we remain stuck in the troubles we always had. It is imperative we renovate the machine – no, not renovate it, but smash it entirely, so that we allow women to be all they need to be.
And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
A person’s not free if their freedom has to be “given”.
Blush like you mean it.
People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven’t the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love.
What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren’t for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. – Jerzy Kosinski.