Ellen Scout Valente > Ellen Scout's Quotes

“Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.”
― W.H. Auden

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street”
― W.H. Auden

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
― W.H. Auden, New Year Letter

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”
― W.H. Auden

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”
― W.H. Auden

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”
― W.H. Auden

“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
― W.H. Auden

“In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”
― W. H. Auden

“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“They had never struggled, and only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“You confuse what's important with what's impressive.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“I've wanted to feel pleasure to the point of insanity. They call it getting high, because it's wanting to know that higher level, that godlike level. You want to touch the heavens, you want to feel glory and euphoria, but the trick is it takes work. You can't buy it, you can't get it on a street corner, you can't steal it or inject it or shove it up your ass, you have to earn it.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“Just the kind of girl I liked—the weirdo in the bunch.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“One of the better definitions of insanity - doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue