Cleo Sood > Cleo's Quotes

“When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”
― Italo Calvino

“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”
― Victor Hugo

“I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I can barely conceive a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Happy is not the right word. This world is not a place where we can be happy. It wasn’t created for man’s happiness, though many believe this is the reason of our existence. I think we are here to fight, so that good and evil can clash within us, and good may prevail, thus enriching us spiritually. It’s difficult to say whether we are happy or not: it doesn’t depend on us… There are times when one regrets being born, but life also gives us surprising things that, alone, are worth living. The issue of happiness doesn’t exist for me: happiness as such doesn’t exist.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“INTERVIEWER: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION: It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”
― Joan Didion

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”
― Harvey Pekar

“I hate writing, I love having written.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely...When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“She was America-for-spacious-skies, the reason our boys died gladly in the war.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“She really does hate parties and crowds and she really does love people one by one in such a way that she's bound to always be involved in parties and crowds.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“God what a night. I was so glad you were home, standing up in all that wind while everyone else was blowing across the streets like tumbleweeds. I wonder if you wish you hadn't been there, with the future looming up in such utter chaos before us. And meanwhile, the night was old and you were beautiful.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots we become part of the unity of our environments.”
― Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama

“I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds