All Quotes

"Butterfly McQueen - Prissy"

"Beck's bass player (Justin Meldal-Johnsen) suggested I do a cover of Slayer's 'Raining Blood," she says applying strawberry lip balm with her pinkie. "I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan--the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues. And when i heard that song, i just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers."

"Babooshka's just one of those song's you just can't get out of your head, can you? You know, how she just takes a word, and you start seeing images and pictures. To a word that maybe you haven't used … it's "Babooshka" and she's turned that into an emotion, that's just how she's able to use a combination of a word and a combination of a melody and the rhythm of that, and it creates a new language."

"I just remember pulling aside, I was driving, and I heard it on the radio, in the states — and she didn't really get played a lot in the states, until that song — that really got played — a lot. I remember, I had to pull over, and listen to it, because I'd never heard anything like it."

"The intention is to tell a story, to create a sonic world for us, a sonic painting, for us to walk into, without having to see her. She's transcending that. She's choosing to transcend that. And that's a very powerful thing to do."

"And I rode along side Till you lost me there In the open road And I rode along side Till the honey spread Itself so thin For me to break your bread For me to take your word I had to steal it."

"You could taste heaven perfectly."

"An angel's face is tricky to wear constantly."

"Just what God needs: one more victim. Why do we crucify ourselves?"

"Got enough guilt to start my own religion."

"I've got a cat named Easter; he says, 'Will you ever learn? You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird.'"

"It was me And a gun And a manOn my back But I haven't seen Barbados so I must get out of this"

"I found the secret to life; I'm okay when everything is not okay"

"God, sometimes you just don't come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?"

"So if I die today, I'll be the happy phantom, And I'll go chasing the nuns out in the yard, ...And the atrocities of school I can forgive: The happy phantom has no right to bitch."

"Look, I'm standing naked before you; Don't you want more than my sex? I can scream as loud as your last one, But I can't claim innocence."

"So you can make me cum; that doesn't make you Jesus."

"So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. What's so amazing about really deep thoughts? Boy, you'd best pray that I bleed real soon -- How's that thought for you?"

"Years go by Will I still be waiting For somebody else to understand Years go by If I'm stripped of my beauty And the orange clouds Raining in head Years go by Will I choke on my tears Till finally there is nothing left One more casualty You know we're too easy Easy Easy"

"I think there are pieces of me you've never seen."

"I can't believe that I would keep, keep you from flying And I would cry a thousand more if that's what it takes to sail you home."

"If you know me so well, then tell me which hand I use."

"A man bites into a dry peach and says "This peach is not good;" the peach replies "It is not my fault that you don't know the proper use for a dry peach.""

"Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again."

"Nothing's gonna stop me from floating."

"I have got my rape hat on, honey, but I always could accessorize."

"You thought that you were the bomb, yes well so did I."

"Just having thoughts of Marianne, quickest girl in the frying pan."

"Say a word to the hangman for me, me and my baby."

"Is it sweet, your sting?"

"So she prays for a prankster and lust in the marriage bed And he waits till she can give And he waits and he waits."

"And I fear my fear is greater than my faith"

"Driving in my Saab, on my way to Ireland."

"At this Helen laughed outright. "Nonsense," she said. "You're not a Christian. You've never thought what you are.—And there are lots of other questions," she continued, "though perhaps we can't ask them yet." Although they had talked so freely they were all uncomfortably conscious that they really knew nothing about each other. "The important questions," Hewet pondered, "the really interesting ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them." Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very few things can be said even by people who know each other well, insisted on knowing what he meant. "Whether we've ever been in love?" she enquired. "Is that the kind of question you mean?""

"On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

"An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw?"

"I bought the blue paper book [Ulysses], & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of immense boredom."

"Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person."

"Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties — one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world."

"The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible."

"For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it."

"Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that. V."

"One cannot grow fine flowers in a thin soil."

"For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple."

"No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon."

""What is this romance?" she mused. "Ah, that’s the question. I’ve never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones"—he glanced in the direction of his books. "It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s ignorance," she hazarded. "Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—" "Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—" she hesitated."

"The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?"

"But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets."

"Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it."

"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."