Quotes About Influence

Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.

You see what power is – holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them

I learned about opening moves and why it's important to control the center early on; the shortest distance between two points is straight down the middle.

Later they will remember those moments with you. But they are not memories of you, but the feeling they were immortal because you made them gods.

Anyone can have original style," he countered. "And yet no one truly does. We're influenced by those who came before us, beginning with the painters thousands of years ago who imitated nature.

Aparte de un marido e hijos, necesito otra cosa a la que dedicarme. No quiero haber vivido para nada, como la mayoría de las personas. Quiero ser de utilidad y alegría para los que viven a mi alrededor, aún sin conocerme. ¡Quiero seguir viviendo, aun después de muerta!

I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

He had not touched me. He did not need to. His presence had affected me in such a way that I felt as if he had caressed me for a long time.

I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .

Our talks are wonderful, interplays, not duels but swift illuminations of one another. I can make his tentative thoughts click. He enlarges mine. I fire him. He makes me flow. There is always movement between us. And he is grasping. He takes hold of me like a prey.

Watch the conqueror well, watch the man or woman who dominates another: he is not the one who loves. The one who loves is the one who is dominated.

what she hated above all was that most men in her presence wilted, grew small and feeble. only the timid ones approached her, as if to seek her strength.

Believing in the danger which sprang from objects as well as people, which dress, which shoes, which coat demanded less of her panicked heart and body? For a costume was a challenge too, a discipline, a trap which once adopted could influence the actor.

safe there from inquiry and exposure? But in this jungle, a pair of eyes, not her own, had followed and found her. Her mother's eyes. She had first seen the world through her mother's eyes, and seen herself through her mother's eyes. Children were like kittens, at first they did not have vision, they did not see themselves except reflected in the eyes of the parents.

I smile because I listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by the unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated, one arm dead, the other rhapsodising in mid-air. I laugh, not when it fits into my talk, but when it fits into the undercurrents of my talk.

I have become an idiot like Gertrude Stein. That's what love does to intelligent women. They cannot write letters anymore.

Then the anger about blaming society for the situation in which we find ourselves — blaming, say, man for the situation in which woman finds herself. I don't believe in that because I believe very much our double responsibility, that we engage ourselves in destructive relationships, that we have a part of the responsibility, unconsciously.

And one thought of the French word for hostess, entraineuse, which meant to pull, to magnetize, to lure in her wake.

P.S. The excerpts will follow in the next mail. Just read Unamuno! My Unamuno! Where is that tragic sense of life? I want it. I may write on Gide's Dostoevsky tomorrow. Everything is stirring in me—Fraenkel, Proust, Unamuno, Osborn, Lawrence

My mother won't live any longer in the house of a person capable of writing such a "dirty" book as my study of Lawrence.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born

I never want to try and be a thinker again. I'm not a thinker. I'd really like to read what somebody else wrote about Lawrence, and, by God, hereafter I will.

You are much much greater on women. Céline is arid.