
“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”
Source: Let the Great World Spin
Source: Catching Fire
“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”
Source: Let the Great World Spin
“She liked people. Me, I can take them or leave them, but mostly leave them.”
Source: The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year
The Story of the Ballad of the Devil's Backbone Tavern.
Near Truths and Hotel Rooms (2003)
Context: (Spoken) You get out in the desert and there's no signs. And of course it was just me and all my friends, it was all guys in the car, so we drove about another two and a half hours before we ever pulled over and asked anybody where we was. And we were on this thing called the Devil's Backbone Highway, right, so we finally pull into this place uniquely named "The Devil's Backbone Tavern." We go in, and all the guys say I gotta go in, you know. And so I go in there, and it's one of them bars, like everyone's drinking beer and there are like, say, twenty people in there and they have maybe, say, seventeen teeth total in the whole place. And I'm not a good fighter, or very good at protecting myself at all, you know! And I thought, well this could - this may not work out. So I saw behind the bar there was this one older woman; she looked like she was in her eighties and she kinda hunched over like I remember my grandma started to do, she kinda, she had curly white hair, and she's all... I thought, well, I could take her...
“When I die it's not me that will be affected. It's the ones I leave behind.”
DFK6498
“People like eccentrics and they will therefore leave me alone, saying that I am a "mad clown."”
As quoted in Vaslav Nijinsky : A Leap into Madness by Peter F. Ostwald, Ch. 8: Playing the Role of a Madman, p. 176
Unsourced variant: I know everyone will say "Nijinsky has gone mad," but I don’t care because I have already played the mad man at home. That is what everyone will think, but they won’t put me in an insane asylum because I dance very well and give money to anyone who asks. People like eccentrics, so they will leave me alone and say I’m a mad clown. I like the mentally ill because I know how to talk to them. When my brother was in an insane asylum, I loved him and he could feel me. His friends liked me. I was eighteen then. I understood the life of a mentally ill person.
Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. IX
“I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.”
Lord Goring, Act IV
An Ideal Husband (1895)