Charles Dickens Quotes

I bought Jayne Mansfield's mansion in L.A. after her death. I had met her in England and remembered her perfume. When I moved in, I could smell her, and I saw her apparition.

"I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night," returned the haunted man.

Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it.

Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.

Very hot and still the air was, Very smooth the gliding river, Motionless the sleeping shadows.

I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

I share the same advice that my mom gave me - stay hydrated and sleep well. And that being a beautiful person on the inside is what really matters.

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

We can all be beautiful girls.

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.

Tonight, she went into the woods, and I fear she shall live in the woods of my soul for the rest of my days.

One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl.

Basically I can't sleep without every single song I'm writing repeating endlessly, but I'm loving it again. Embracing the torture, as I'm assaulted by my own thoughts. Like a locust giving birth to earworms. Eeeeew!

There are hundreds of thousands of kids walking around with a sleeping monster inside them.

I'm trying not to move, it's just your ghost passing through

... when the locked door opens, and there comes in a young woman, deadly pale, and with long fair hair, who glides to the fire, and sits down in the chair we have left there, wringing her hands.

Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains.

It is the sweetest spring within the memory of man. So green, so mild, so beautiful! Ah, what a contrast between nature without and my own soul so torn with doubt and terror!

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image.

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

He is spent. His mind is mercury again, its brief surge of humanity melting into an oily residue on its surface, and he no longer understands the feelings he felt in that strange moment on the overpass. But he did feel them. They did happen. They rest on the murky seabed of his mind, buried under sand and silt and miles of grey waves. Patient seeds waiting for light.

I used to think I was unstable, because I had this thirst for something. I could never figure out what it was. I couldn’t sleep at night, and I always wanted to be somewhere else. I have a window tattooed, this little box, and it’s because wherever I was, I wanted to be somewhere else. And, I always saw myself, wherever I was in life, staring out the window.

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.

The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.