It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.
QUENTIN CRISPTo love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
More Quentin Crisp Quotes
-
-
The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face
QUENTIN CRISP -
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
QUENTIN CRISP -
I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?
QUENTIN CRISP -
I’m happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I’ve never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I’m told to say.
QUENTIN CRISP -
No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
QUENTIN CRISP -
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISP -
The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.
QUENTIN CRISP -
You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
QUENTIN CRISP -
You can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who…have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.
QUENTIN CRISP -
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.
QUENTIN CRISP -
Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.
QUENTIN CRISP