Inventing Anna Quotes

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

Mr. Cruncher... always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.

All really interesting girls invent themselves.

We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?

It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.

Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should be.

You invented me. There is no such earthly being, Such an earthly being there could never be. A doctor cannot cure, a poet cannot comfort— A shadowy apparition haunts you night and day. We met in an unbelievable year, When the world's strength was at an ebb, Everything withered by adversity, And only the graves were fresh. Without streetlights, the Neva's waves were black as pitch, Thick night enclosed me like a wall ... That's when my voice called out to you! Why it did—I still don't understand. And you came to me, as if guided by a star That tragic autumn, stepping Into that irrevocably ruined house, From whence had flown a flock of burnt verse.

Wow. I'm twenty years old. Rene Descartes invented analytic geometry in his early twenties. Talk about pressure.

You will not tame this sea either by humility or rapture. But you can laugh in its face. Laughter was invented by those who live briefly as a burst of laughter. The eternal sea will never learn to laugh.

In Memory of M. B. Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense. You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain. You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls. Alone you let the terrible stranger in, and stayed with her alone. Now you’re gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life. Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast. Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all, would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me, hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.

intriguing people have to invent a noxious, dangerous party...

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.

No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems

It was an insane venture. And then, while I was working away at figuring out how to make it happen, I watched Inventing Anna, and at the end of the whole series of episodes, this accomplished con artist was asked what most surprised her about people... She said she was surprised that people couldn't live with a higher level of anxiety. She believed that that was what brought her down. And at that moment I knew that that was what I needed to get through this whole venture: to be able to live with that level of anxiety. And I could. And I did.

Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)

I adjusted my skirt again and looked down to evaluate the decency of its length. It's fine, Anna. At least my legs had a little muscle these days, instead of looking like a pair of toothpicks. Although I'd been pegged with nicknames like "Twiggy" and "Sticks" growing up, I didn't obsess about my figure, or lack of one. Padded bras were a helpful invention, and I was satisfied with the two small indentations in my sides that passed for a waist. Running had become my new pastime five weeks ago, after I'd read how my body is the "temple of my soul." Healthy temple: check.

If necessity is the mother of invention, Anna thinks desperation might be the father of change.

Levin had often noticed in arguments between even the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing. That was the very thing he wanted to say.

(Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)

I suggested she try walking to class without listening to anything and just letting her own thoughts bubble to the surface. She looked at me both incredulous and afraid. “Why would I do that?” she asked, openmouthed. “Well,” I ventured, “it’s a way of becoming familiar with yourself. Of letting your experience unfold without trying to control it or run away from it. All that distracting yourself with devices may be contributing to your depression and anxiety. It’s pretty exhausting avoiding yourself all the time. I wonder if experiencing yourself in a different way might give you access to new thoughts and feelings, and help you feel more connected to yourself, to others, and to the world.” She thought about that for a moment. “But it’s so boring,” she said. “Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.

It's odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn't know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I invented. And finally I was what I was again..."Anna Quindlen

He’d homed in on that flag issue, the flags-and-emblems issue, instinctive and emotional because flags were invented to be instinctive and emotional – often pathologically, narcissistically emotional – and he meant that flag of the country from ‘over the water’ which was also the same flag of the community from ‘over the road’. It was not a flag greatly welcomed in our community. Not a flag at all welcomed in our community

There was nothing on any of the canvasses that she would have liked to hide or conceal, nor was she ashamed of being thus exposed through her work, good or bad though it might be, the essence, the unique flavour of days when she had been happily engrossed in recreating a face or a garment, in inventing an effective light, in applying an expressive glaze.

But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around

Oh,” Anna said. She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.

It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented.

The only one of the early investigators who carried the exploration of hysteria to its logical conclusion was Breuer's patient Anna O. After Breuer abandoned her, she apparently remained ill for several years. And then she recovered. The mute hysteric who had invented the "talking cure" found her voice and her sanity, in the women's liberation movement. Under a pseudonym, Paul Berthold, she translated into German the classic treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and authored a play, Women's Rights. Under her own name, Bertha Papenheim became a prominent feminist social worker, intellectual, and organizer. In the course of a long and fruitful career she directed an orphanage for girls, founded a feminist organization for Jewish women and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East to campaign against the sexual exploitation of women and children. Her dedication, energy and commitment were legendary. In the words of a colleague, 'A volcano lived in this woman... Her fight against the abuse of women and children was almost a physically felt pain for her.' At her death, the philosopher Martin Buber commemorated her: 'I not only admired her but loved her, and will love her until the day I die. There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionate spirit. Bertha Pappenheim was a woman with just such a spirit.

Fuck! How many times do I have to tell you? The butter goes into a butter dish because otherwise it absorbs all the other smells! And the cheese too! Transparent wrap wasn't invented for dogs, shit! And what the hell is this? Lettuce? Why did you leave it in a plastic bag? Plastic ruins everything! I've already told you, Philibert. Where are all those containers I brought home the other day? And what about this lemon? What's it doing in the egg compartment? You cut open a lemon, you wrap it up or put it upside down on a plate, capice?

Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.

The scene was Mr. Cruncher's private lodging in Hanging Sword Alley, Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March morning, Anno Domino seventeen hundred and eight. (Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes; apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.

He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.

Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht’s heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. (...) The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.

Et ensuite ? Ensuite, la vie a repris son cours. C'est comme ça qu'on dit, non, quand il ne se passe rien ? Quand on oublie ses bonnes résolutions, quand on abandonne ses rêves de liberté et de grandeur et qu'on continue à boire des coups et à en tirer à gauche à droite en s'inventant des comédies pas romantiques du tout. A déshabiller Paul pour rhabiller Pierre pour se retrouver finalement nue dans les bras de Jacques. Oui, c'est comme ça qu'on dit.

Yes, you do hate Switzerland. And," doctor Messerli paused for effect, "you love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don't feel is apathy. You're not indifferent. You're ambivalent." Anna had thought about this before, when nights came during which she could do nothing but wander Dietlikon's sleeping streets or hike the hill behind her house to sit upon the bench where most often she went to weep. She'd considered her ambivalence many, many times, and in the end, she's diagnosed herself with a disease that she'd also invented. Switzerland syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome. But instead of my captors, I'm attached to the room in which I'm held captive. It's the prison I'm bound to, not the warden. Anna was absolutely right. It was the landscape. it was the geography. The fields, the streams, the lakes, the forests. And the mountains. On exceptionally clear days when the weather was right, if you walked south on Dietlikon's Bahnhofstrasse you could see the crisp outlines of snow-capped Alps against a blazing blue horizon eighty kilometers away. On these certain days it was something in the magic of the atmosphere that made them tangible and moved them close. The mutability of those particular mountains reminded Anna of herself. And it wasn't simply the natural landscape that she attached herself to emotionally. It was the cobblestone roads of Zürich's old town and the spires of this church and the towers of that one. And the trains, the trains, the goddamn trains. She could take the train anywhere she wanted to go.

The weirdest manifestation of the new exclusivity was the cult of ‘Sarmatism’, based on the lunatic notion that the Polish nobility were descended from a mythic eastern warrior-tribe called the Sarmatians, justifying an imaginary racial divide with the rest of the population. In line with their newly-invented Sarmatian credentials, the szlachta developed a bizarre taste for the bejewelled and exotic.

Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.

You are a beautiful, strong soul. In a world where you can be anything, be kind.

I couldn't conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?

In the course of this account, partly because of the nature of the history and partly because of the great importance of these events, I have forgotten that it is my father whose successes I am writing of. Often, in my desire not to incur suspicion, in the composition of my history I hurry over affairs that concern him, neither exaggerating nor adding my personal observations. I wish I were detached and free from this feeling that I have for him, so that seizing on this vast material I might demonstrate how much my tongue, when release from all restraint, could delight in noble deeds. But the natural love I have for him overshadows my personal wishes: I would not like the public to imagine that I am inventing marvels in my eagerness to speak about my own family. On many occasions when I recalled the glorious deeds of my father, if I had written down and given a full account of all the troubles he endured, I would have wept away my very soul, and I could not have passed over the story without lamentation and mourning. But so far as that part of my history is concerned, I must avoid the subtleties of rhetoric, and like some unfeeling stone or marble pass quickly over his misfortunes. If I wanted to win a deserved reputation for loving him, I should have included his disasters in an oath, like the young man who swore: “No Agelaos, by Zeus and by my father’s woes”. For I am certainly no worse than that young man. But now we must leave my father’s sufferings; I alone must marvel at them and weep, but the reader must return to the narrative.

I have once again tangled myself up in expectations I’ve invented for myself, a test I’ve failed with nobody keeping score.

One of the best tricks a garden plays is that you never quite remember how it's going to be, that first day after winter has gone, when you go outside and can stay outside all day fiddling with jobs that aren't pressing enough to weigh heavily but will nevertheless pay dividends. A garden is made up of a thousand small inventions, but each small act is a defence (defiance even) against a world without anchors or safe harbours.

Anna and the boys escorted me into Boston last week to meet with Mr. Niles about your book. Afterward, we rode on these marvelous little pontoons called Swan Boats in the Public Garden. An inventive fellow has capitalized on the bicycle craze and created a paddle-wheel boat in which the driver propels the boat by peddling—all while the driver’s presence is covered up by the statue of an enormous swan. Apparently, he was inspired by the German opera “Lohengrin” in which a knight of the Grail must cross the river in a boat disguised as a swan to rescue his princess. And you’ve said Boston has no culture! You would love the romance of these beautiful boats. Sadly, the man who invented the fanciful little fleet perished unexpectedly, yet his wife wants to keep the operation afloat.

As soon as the edifice of the knowledge of the ancients had been shaken in the minds of the most inquisitive, questions upon questions arose which now demanded technology, including -- crucially -- the invention of the telescope and the microscope, enabling a generation of scholars to see clearly things which had been absolutely invisible to their forefathers. It was a thrilling, and dangerous, time to be alive.

Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn’t conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?” “That’s what reason is given man for, to escape from what worries him,” said the lady in French, lisping affectedly, and obviously pleased with her phrase.

We know how proud Edoardo was of his family name and status. It seemed to him, and to those like him, that fate itself, having placed him in a privileged class, wanted to show that he considered him better than others, almost as if he had been produced from the rarest of ores. Although his instinct to dominate often led him to love those lower than himself, he never had the intention or even the thought of elevating the person he loved to his own rank. In the same way that the gods, when they wanted to marry humans, had to descend to earth in their human forms, or as animals or clouds, but they never elevated their earthly lovers to enjoy the privileges of Olympus. In Edoardo’s case, he received an overabundance of pleasure from his sense of social superiority. But instead of thinking he might abolish this difference between him and Anna, to the contrary, he yearned for Anna to mentally absorb her lowliness, so that he could see that proud person submissive and quivering before him. To achieve this goal, he continued to invent cruel tricks to play on her.

I shake my head. If I don’t pursue talking to Lois, then this was for nothing. I’ve wasted everyone’s time. I am a fraud. If I do try to talk to Lois, I risk confronting a woman for a project I’m not even sure the scope of, and she’ll know I’m a fraud. I have once again tangled myself up in expectations I’ve invented for myself, a test I’ve failed with nobody keeping score.

The most common way to establish contact with our fellow men is through language. Yet like Strindberg, Bergman distrusts language as a means of communication in any deeper sense. We have already seen how Elisabet in Persona chooses muteness in the conviction that words equal lies. Taking Hummel’s remark in The Ghost Sonata to heart that languages are “codes” invented “to conceal the secrets of one tribe from the others,” Bergman often demonstrates how language rather than serve as a means of communication serves as a conscious or unconscious barrier. This idea is fundamental in The Silence, where the main characters are confronted with a language, construed by Bergman, which is as unintelligible to them as to us. The inability to understand the foreign language is here a metaphor for our inability to understand one another truly. While Anna in The Silence tries to communicate via the senses, her sister Ester, a professional translator, tries to do so via reason. In her attempt to understand the foreign language she is, like the Student in The Ghost Sonata, a seeker who tries to understand life intellectually. In the nightmarish exam scene of Wild Strawberries, professor emeritus Isak Borg, who has been a harsh examiner, finds himself in the position of his former students. It is now his turn to be harshly examined and to fail his exam. His failure is serious since the blackboard text Isak is unable to decipher tells what a doctor’s—read: man’s--primary duty is: to care for your fellow men. The sequence is a contamination of the Asylum scene in To Damascus I and the school scene in A Dream Play. In the former the Stranger is condemned for the wrongs he has done to his fellow men, in the latter the Officer, recently conferred doctor, finds himself returned to primary school. In Wild Strawberries we have a thematic counterpart of the school scene when young Sara tells Isak, as she holds a mirror in front of his face, that although he knows a lot, he knows in fact almost nothing—that is, about the essentials of life. When Tomas, the doubting priest in Winter Light sits down at one of the pupils’ desks in the local school, it is a discreet reminder that he, like Isak Borg and the Officer, needs to “mature” as it says in A Dream Play.

The most common way to establish contact with our fellow men is through language. Yet like Strindberg, Bergman distrusts language as a means of communication in any deeper sense. We have already seen how Elisabet in Persona chooses muteness in the conviction that words equal lies. Taking Hummel’s remark in The Ghost Sonata to heart that languages are “codes” invented “to conceal the secrets of one tribe from the others,” Bergman often demonstrates how language rather than serve as a means of communication serves as a conscious or unconscious barrier. This idea is fundamental in The Silence, where the main characters are confronted with a language, construed by Bergman, which is as unintelligible to them as to us. The inability to understand the foreign language is here a metaphor for our inability to understand one another truly. While Anna in The Silencetries to communicate via the senses, her sister Ester, a professional translator, tries to do so via reason. In her attempt to understand the foreign language she is, like the Student in The Ghost Sonata, a seeker who tries to understand life intellectually. In the nightmarish exam scene of Wild Strawberries, professor emeritus Isak Borg, who has been a harsh examiner, finds himself in the position of his former students. It is now his turn to be harshly examined and to fail his exam. His failure is serious since the blackboard text Isak is unable to decipher tells what a doctor’s—read: man’s--primary duty is: to care for your fellow men. The sequence is a contamination of the Asylum scene in To Damascus I and the school scene in A Dream Play. In the former the Stranger is condemned for the wrongs he has done to his fellow men, in the latter the Officer, recently conferred doctor, finds himself returned to primary school. In Wild Strawberries we have a thematic counterpart of the school scene when young Sara tells Isak, as she holds a mirror in front of his face, that although he knows a lot, he knows in fact almost nothing—that is, about the essentials of life. When Tomas, the doubting priest in Winter Light sits down at one of the pupils’ desks in the local school, it is a discreet reminder that he, like Isak Borg and the Officer, needs to “mature” as it says in A Dream Play.

Il concetto del suo irrealismo logico, che è il contrario del realismo magico altrui: "Se il realismo magico è realismo con dettagli irreali, allora l'irrealismo logico è il suo gemello opposto: irrealtà con dettagli realistici... Eppure, esiste forse qualcosa di più irreale del cosiddetto realismo? Quei racconti e romanzi con un tempo drammatico e un ordine degli avvenimenti perfettamente calcolati e amministrati. Come Madame Bovary. O la struttura scrupolosa e l'andamento preciso di quasi tutti i romanzi polizieschi. Ma la realtà non è così. La realtà è indisciplinata e imprevedibile. La realtà è autenticamente irreale.... Ci sono più realismo e verosimiglianza in un solo giorno di libero e fluido e cosciente girovagare di Clarissa Dalloway che in tutta la prolissa e ben dosata vita e morte di Anna Karenina. Quindi, di fronte a tanti scrittori che si dicono impegnati nella realtà, io opto per presentarmi come uno scrittore profondamente impegnato nell'irrealtà. Ah, gli scrittori impegnati...

But scheming people always have invented and always will invent some harmful and dangerous Party.

He had said nothing of the sordid side, of the intrigues, and jealousies and promiscuous love affairs which flourished like weeds in the hotbed of Nazi Youth. Franz had enjoyed the Outings until he began to discover what lay beneath the surface, but before he left home he had grown tired of them and faintly disgusted, and on several occasions he had made excuses to remain behind. He had grown a little tired of the Youth Songs, too, and had sometimes wished that they could sing some of the songs which had been loved and prized long before the Youth Songs were invented—the songs that Tant’ Anna sang when she thought that nobody was listening—songs by Schubert and Brahms and Strauss, lovely melodies and words which touched the heart—but Franz had never dared to put this wish into words for his contemporaries would have laughed him to scorn.

But don't excite yourself. It's not at all the thing for you to be excited," said her mother. "Oh, I'm not excited, mamma. I fancy he will make her an offer today." "Ah, that's so strange, how and when a man makes an offer!… There is a sort of barrier, and all at once it's broken down," said Dolly, smiling pensively and recalling her past with Stepan Arkadyevitch. "Mamma, how did papa make you an offer?" Kitty asked suddenly. "There was nothing out of the way, it was very simple," answered the princess, but her face beamed all over at the recollection. "Oh, but how was it? You loved him, anyway, before you were allowed to speak?" Kitty felt a peculiar pleasure in being able now to talk to her mother on equal terms about those questions of such paramount interest in a woman's life. "Of course I did; he had come to stay with us in the country." "But how was it settled between you, mamma?" "You imagine, I dare say, that you invented something quite new? It's always just the same: it was settled by the eyes, by smiles…" "How nicely you said that, mamma! It's just by the eyes, by smiles that it's done," Dolly assented. "But what words did he say?" "What did Kostya say to you?" "He wrote it in chalk. It was wonderful…. How long ago it seems!" she said. And the three women all fell to musing on the same thing.