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“I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“A person could theoretically love and maybe many do but we both know now you can't.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“You do not,�� cried Giovanni, sitting up, ‘love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime.�� He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”
― William Shakespeare , Hamlet

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“We are slaves to the gods. Whatever gods are.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“Is that vodka?" Margarita asked weakly.
The cat jumped up in his seat with indignation.
"I beg pardon, my queen," he rasped, "Would I ever allow myself to offer vodka to a lady? This is pure alcohol!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Everyone knows that drunkards and lovers have a protecting diety.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour”
― Euripides, Medea

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Hold my hand in yours, and we will not fear what hands like ours can do.”
― Anonymous, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“And since you know you cannot see yourself,
so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Come, butterfly
It's late-
We've miles to go together.”
― Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.”
― Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Sweet mother, I cannot weave ��
slender Aphrodite has overcome me
with longing for a girl.”
― Sappho, Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works

“None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.”
― Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (Erik)”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

“You’re a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“She waited for him, she stitched for years. And if he had come back broken and defeated from war, she would have loved him even more. And if he had returned mutilated, ugly, full of infection and horror, she would still have loved him; fed by pity, by a sharing of pain, she would love him even more, and even more, and she would never, never have prayed to God, please let him die if he can’t return to me whole and healthy and able to live a normal life . . . If he had died, she would have buried her heart with him.
So what the fuck is the matter with me?”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That's how people change.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”
― Tony Kushner, Perestroika