Latest Quotes

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

“And yet to wine, to opium even, I prefer the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself; and in the wasteland of desire your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.”

— Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of moveme…”

— Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“After blearily looking at the internet a little, then peeing and brushing his teeth and washing his face, he lay in darkness on his mattress, finally allowing the simple insistence of the opioid, like an unending chord progression with a consistently unexpected and pleasing manner of postponing reso…”

— Tao Lin, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries)

“Feels like I 'only' want to convey incredibly powerful, convincing, unceasing messages of I don't know and I have nothing to say to you.”

— Tao Lin, Twitter (5 Mar 2011)

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I'd known, maybe I'd have kept tighter hold of them and not let unseen tides pull us apart.”

— Carey Mulligan, Never Let Me Go

“The collections of quotations from classical authors in the twelfth century were generally called fores philosophorum or flores auctorum, or to use term adopted by modern historians, flower-collections.”

— Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought

“We should imitate bees and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and turn the…”

— Seneca, Seneca, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought

“He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place— in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb— to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to b…”

— Tao Lin, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries)

“Lotto’s heart kicked froglike in his chest; sweeping toward him in her brilliant blue skirt, Mathilde. His azure lion rampant. Her long hair plaited down her left breast, she, the nexus of all the good of this world.”

— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies: A Novel

“A woman is often a wonderful thing. And you are. But in you, as in all of them, is the indifference of Carmen, the joy in cruelty of Cleopatra, the tyrannical marble-heartedness of Katherine De Medici, and the cold glitter of all the passionless despots of men’s warm souls since sex first originated…”

— James Thurber, The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber

“Arthur, my dearest, I must write you, or you will think I did not get your letters. But when I start to write you all I can think of to say to you is — Why aren’t you here? Oh, why aren’t you here? — And I have written that to you before… I have nothing to say but that I long to see you. I am glad t…”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I was relaxed in the suburbs. Everything was different: the rhythm of the days, your social status, suspicions about people. It was a refuge for the less competitive; it was the minor leagues. You simply didn’t have to pay as much attention to things.”

— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park (Vintage Contemporaries)

“I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of nonfiction as I could in any of my novels and so I gave up.”

— Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

“There are so many things Blair doesn’t get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? The fades,…”

— Bret Easton Ellis, Clay Easton, Imperial Bedrooms (Vintage Contemporaries)

“The ways of reflection constantly are changing, according to the station along the way at which the journey begins, according to the distance along the way that it traverses, according to the vision that opens up while underway into what is question worthy.”

— Martin Heidegger, Heidegger and Unconcealment

“I just miss — I miss being anonymous.”

— Barack Obama, President Obama: 'I Miss Being Anonymous'

“The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day.”

— Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy Interview

“We believe that the world is knowable: that there are simple rules governing the behavior of matter and the evolution of the universe. We affirm that there are eternal, objective, extra-historical, socially-neutral, external and universal truths. The assemblage of these truths is what we call Scienc…”

— Sheldon Glashow, Scientific Perspectivism