i'm going to make a list of my favourite quotes here. some of these writers really inspire me! ill add to it gradually.
“i'll read one book and be completely wild about it—i'll trust it, i'll assimilate it, i'll sympathize with it, i'll try to make it a part of my life. then, i'll read another book and, instantly, i'll switch over to that one. the sly ability to steal someone else's experience and recreate it as if it were my own is the only real talent i possess. really, though, my guile is so bogus as to be offensive. if i were to experience failure upon failure day after day—nothing but total embarrassment—then perhaps i'd develop some semblance of dignity as a result. but no, i would somehow illogically twist even such failures, gloss over them smoothly, so that it would seem like they had a perfectly good theory behind them. and i would have no qualms about putting on a desperate show to do so.”
osamu dazai, the schoolgirl
“an ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. if i were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, i could defeat ugliness. a man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.”
yukio mishima, the sailor who fell from grace with the sea
“don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
anne rice, the metamorphosis (forward)
“o light! this is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. this last resort was ours, too, and i knew it now. in the middle of winter t at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
albert camus, l'été
“when, indeed, men speak of beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, or of heart.”
edgar allan poe, the philosophy of composition
“i swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness--a real thorough-going illness.”
fyodor dostoyevsky, notes from underground
“and so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.”
edgar allan poe, romance
“perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
yukio mishima, runaway horses
“all our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
walt disney