Quotes to inspire and reflect

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.

On this tenth day of June 1940 the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets!

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue .

When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. . . . To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

Electric flesh-arrows . . . traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eye-lids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden as if in caves.

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that every thing that is born of her is planted in her.

The only compliment he ever paid her was You sweat less than any fat girl I know.

Passion, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and . . . music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.

On ne Badine pas avec l’Amour .

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour,

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

[ J. Cheever Loophole, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.

He knew only that the child was his warrant.

[ Hammer, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] I’ll meet you tonight under the moon. Oh, I can see you now, you and the moon. You wear a necktie so I’ll know you.

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

Marcela loved me during fifteen months and three thousand dollars; nothing more.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens . . . to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

He kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

[ Helmer :] First and foremost, you are a wife and mother.

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.

Our house has never been anything but a play-room. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child. And the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.

The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young woman, it is boldness.

What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

[ Suicide note by a child who killed himself and two siblings :] Done because we are too menny.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Twenty love-sick maidens we, Love-sick all against our will.

Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his place, just as every son had hoped to do in primeval times.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis. . . . This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity. . . . What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus.

Mama, take this badge off of me

How do you know that love is gone? If you said that you would be there at seven, you get there by nine and he or she has not called the police yet—it’s gone.

It was a maxim with Foxey—our revered father, gentlemen—“Always suspect everybody.”

“She is the child of the universe.” “The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”