Quotes by Writers - Page 114

I've always felt like a failure inside if I'm not already a success, if that makes any sense.
Felicia Day
I gradually fell from grace; alas, you dove in headfirst!
Ahmed Mostafa
Weight Loss Versus Health Gain:"Forget the idea of 'losing' anything. Let that happen organically. Instead, focus only on adding the healthy habit of juicing into your system. Think only about the healthy changes you are integrating into your body and not so much about taking anything away. Now, this is more empowering position in which you put yourself. You are in charge of the adding, but you have no control of the subtracting. Let the weight loss be a natural result of the changes that you make and think in terms of adding health into your system instead. Juicing is one such addition.
Farnoosh Brock
The 'Good News' is, the messiah cometh. The bad news is, he never does.
Fakeer Ishavardas
We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.
H.G.Wells
Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry, because it represents a future and the others do not.
Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
The lazy are always wanting to do something.
Vauvenargues
When you've had one call after another and your little one is tugging on your shirt, remember what really matters. When the milk is splattered all over the floor and those little eyes are looking at you for your reaction, remember what really matters. It takes 5 minutes to clean up spilled milk; it takes much longer to clean up a broken spirit.
Rebecca Eanes
Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
To me, quotes function as the sunscreen against a writers brilliance. As soon as I cannot stand to look at the magnificence of the acropolis of pure thought the writer managed to doll out in the cognizant chaos - I quote him, and by doing so I am discharged and freed. On the other hand, even while I do acknowledge that some things cannot be quoted, I vehemently distrust any writer whose army of quotes does not consist of impeccable warriors but the sort of bootless canon fodder that caused one to write in the first place, wishing to circumlocute that strappant lot. No writer can ever recover from bad quotes. I check the army of quotes, and if it has no sporting chance against a simple pack of butter then I will simply never ever read this person. One often hears short stories are the benchmark of great writers, but if you ask me, I'd rather first look at their quotes.
Martijn Benders
When speculation has done its worst two and two still make four.
Samuel Johnson
To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on.
Banana Yoshimoto
A wise man once told me family don’t end in blood, but it doesn’t start there either. Family cares about you, not what you can do for them. Family’s there through the good, bad, all of it. They got your back even when it hurts. That’s family
Eric Kripke
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.
José Saramago
Disease often comes with a smiling face.
Dejan Stojanovic
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
Aldous Huxley
Why did she give up wine for Lent? Polly was more sensible. She had given up strawberry jam. Cecilia had never seen Polly show more than a passing interest in strawberry jam, although now, of course, she was always catching her standing at the open fridge, staring at it longingly. The power of denial.
Liane Moriarty
If I don't take a chance with Gavin Murphy, I think I'll always regret it.
Lex Martin
To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticize ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression
Rowan Atkinson
I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted - and nothing in which I’ve placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment - that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn’t have and could never have them.
Fernando Pessoa
A struggle is fatally injured not so much by the stumbles of its leaders as by their mumbles
Agona Apell
The public! the public! How many fools does it take to make up a public?
Sebastien Chamfort
If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
Aldous Huxley
The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If you watch a scary movie together, then the scariness is cut in half!
Hidekaz Himaruya
I installed a skylight in my apartment...The people who live above me arefurious!
Steven Wright
John Wesley's conversation is good but he is never at leisure. He is always obliged to go at a certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have his talk out as I do.
Samuel Johnson
I wouldn’t have minded school if they taught you important things like how to have good sex and what brand of wine is the best… But for some reason they were hell bent on teaching me algebra
Ben Mitchell
To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak!And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created.
Petrus Borel
He doesn’t see his path clearly, but also doesn’t consider this absolutely necessary; he strikes out in some direction or other, and one thing leads to the next. All paths lead to lives of some sort, and that’s all he requires, for every life promises a great deal and is replete with possibilities enchantingly fulfilled.
Robert Walser
History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.
Tony Hendra
Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.
John Ruskin
If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The curve of man’s knowledge of himself ascends until the 17th century, declines gradually afterwards, in this century it finally plummets
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Always choose the most difficult way, there you will not meet competitors.
Charles de Gaulle
I'm not important, having a child is not an amazing feat, and my child, while extraordinarily important to and beloved by her parents, is not particularly special in the scheme of things.
Emily Flake
Self-publishing a shitty book doesn't make you an author any more than singing in the shower makes you a rockstar or squeezing your pimple makes you a dermatologist.
Oliver Markus
See, the thing about that word, Sharkey, the F-word, is that sometimes I make that word do too much work. I mean, I say that word as if it clearly articulates what I’m really feeling. And it doesn’t. It’s a shortcut.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Hatreds are the cinders of affection.
Walter Raleigh
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is not easy in this world for one person to understand the next one.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As long as he deceived himself about the truth, he could blame fortune and have confidence in the future. Now the clouds of madness were closing round his mind.
Hermann Bahr
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
Samuel Johnson
What we believe spirit visitors to be influences how they affect our lives. What we believe ourselves to be dictates how we react to them.
S. Kelley Harrell
Where did my friend go? Was there a place they all gathered, the lost and self destructive? Was there a room they put them in? Necks burnt with rope or holes in their skulls. Beach-water bloated. I will know this at the end of my conversation with life. I will speak and laugh until my tongue falls out and then I will know this. I will know because he will tell me when I see him. How will I enter the theatre? With a hole in my head or exploded by sea. Wrists.
Brendan Cowell
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William Zinsser
To sense the peace of extinguished passionHappiness in not knowing the ultimate knowledge
Dejan Stojanovic
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
What drives abortion bans and restrictions? The belief that women who have sex for pleasure rather than procreation are sluts.
Leora Tanenbaum
I was too selfish to have a child before I was ready for one, and there's no shame in admitting that. Women should be selfish about our choices, for as long as we have the privilege of being selfish. Selfishness in women isn't the great crime that people like to pretend it is. We are as entitled as men to prioritise ourselves and our desires, and we are as capable as men of knowing what's best for us. Why is everyone so pathologically terrified of selfish women? The word is thrown around like an insult, as if the worst thing a woman could possibly do (aside from being fat, having sex with whomever she pleases and whenever, swearing, having an abortion, drinking alcohol, standing up for herself and being a working mother) is to decide that her life matters.But women are allowed to be selfish. It shouldn't be considered a 'privilege' to be able to control our own bodies nor should it be treated like a favour done to us by the state. It's a right that, by and large, has been stolen from us and used to keep us in thrall to a paternalistic body that pretends to know what's best for us but is really only interested in maintaining the order that has proved best for them.
Clementine Ford
Like most humans, I am hungry...our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it...
M.F.K. Fisher
By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.
H.P. Lovecraft
If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.
Liane Moriarty
Le but n'est rien, le développement est tout. Le spectacle ne veut en venir à rien d'autre qu'à lui-même.
Guy Debord
I have to convince myself every night that I love you before I go to sleep lest I wake up empty.
Ahmed Mostafa
When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.
Banana Yoshimoto
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite.
Voltaire
She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be, Billy said he didn't know.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.
Joseph Campbell