2. “Good things happen to those who hustle.”
3. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
4. “The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.”
5. “Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”
6. “We don’t see people as they are. We see people as we are.”
7. “Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
8. “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”
9. “We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”
10. “I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.”
11. “I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.”
12. “It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.”
13. “I have no brakes on, analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.”
14. “When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”
15. “I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.”
16. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”
17. “Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
18. “Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.”
19. “Dreams are necessary to life.”
20. “I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”
21. “There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.”
22. “In chaos, there is fertility.”
23. “To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice.”
24. “I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.”
25. “When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.”
26. “I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”
27. “Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.”
28. “If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.”
29. “There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.”
30. “Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.”
31. “There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.”
32. “For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.”
33. “Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death.”
34. “We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.”
35. “What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”
36. “I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.”
37. “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
38. “I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.”
39. “The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation.”
40. “To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.”
41. “I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.”
42. “Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.”
43. “You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.”
44. “A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.”
45. “Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.”
46. “There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”
47. “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
48. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
49. “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
50. “The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.”
51. “Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.”
52. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
53. “You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
54. “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and . It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
55. “Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”
56. “How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”
57. “People living deeply have no fear of death.”
58. “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
59. “How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.”
60. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
61. “The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.”
62. “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
63. “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
64. “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
65. “Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
66. “I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.”
67. “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.”
68. “If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”
69. “What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?”
70. “It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”
71. “The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.”
72. “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
73. “Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.”
74. “My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.”
75. “I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.”
76. “We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
77. “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
78. “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”
79. “Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
80. “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”
81. “When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”
82. “The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.”
83. “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”
84. “My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.”
85. “The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.”
86. “Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
87. “There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.”
88. “Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”
89. “Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.”
90. “You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.”
91. “I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”
92. “If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.”
93. “Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.”
94. “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”
95. “Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”
