Quotes by Writers - Page 165

The barber's assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to leave people who ask me about my patriotic feelings in the dark. Or I tell lies and say that I'm Danish. Some kinds of frankness are only hurtful and boring.
Robert Walser
...if anybody was going to blow up the Superland™ Wal-Mart, it was going to be me. Not some fucking crusty punk.
Vanessa Veselka
Is there such depravity in man as that he should injure another without benefit to himself?
Samuel Johnson
Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
My doctor said I look like a million dollars - green and wrinkled.
Red Skelton
It is enough to write a few lines about tanks in the streets in some sad country, about a clear injustice, which requires no description; it is enough to move from one side to another, to satisfy someone’s taste, the need of the moment, the need for “big” games to take a peek into everything and to prove everything with cheap opinions formed almost on command, almost as a recipe of measured pain to resolve the crisis, to extinguish the pain based on a few words that don’t change anything except that they flatter vanity and a misguided interest in all dimensions of life and creation, in the air that is being poisoned by smoke from cars, smoke from the television screens, the smoke curtains of politicians, left and right, the smoke of films and pop culture, smokescreens of intelligence that finds an explanation for all this, makes up theories, finds justification for the schizophrenic decisions of the new rulers, for wars, agreements, contracts; finds justification for obedience, for the sale of beliefs under the disguise of conviction, for several awards, for a few moments of illusion in the hocus-pocus world where the truth does not interest anyone anymore, except for ways for lies to be packaged and sold as the greatest truth with the help of big intellectuals that will find a good argument, a good defense and justification for everything, since everything becomes much easier, if a hoax is supported by “scientific” evidence.
Dejan Stojanovic
The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.
Paul Graham
. . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets.
Libba Bray
If we didn't have shadow we'd just sit around loving the light, likely doing nothing with it.
S. Kelley Harrell
The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.
Hilary Mantel
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Samuel Johnson
He looks like a horse in a man costume!
Dylan Moran
Maybe I did hurt him, but I don’t think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn’t get at him because he just wasn’t interested in people.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Atal felt a spectral change in the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws.
H.P. Lovecraft
It is in your act that you exist not in your body. Your act is yourself and there is no other you.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Depression is a red herring," said Nariman. "I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much percentage in the future.
Rohinton Mistry
Suicide isn't something people do to hurt other people. It's something people do to release themselves from pain.
A.S. King
You could say I’m so manly I don’t even allow manly stereotypes to influence my actions
Ben Mitchell
Q. But it seems to me there are circumstances that simply induce one to have negative emo
P.D. Ouspensky
If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds.
Roger Zelazny
I rise from the moist crevice of thought, I beat on the shores of her holy body, I fall from the sky in silver sheets of sadness. Rise onto me my precious sun.
A.P. Sweet
Don't ever think you're better than a drug addict, because your brain works the same as theirs. You have the same circuits. And drugs would affect your brain in the same way it affects theirs. The same thought process that makes them screw up over and over again would make you screw up over and over as well, if you were in their shoes. You probably already are doing it, just not with heroin or crack, but with food or cigarettes, or something else you shouldn't be doing.
Oliver Markus
God knows we have our own demons to be cast out, our own uncleanness to be cleansed. Neurotic anxiety happens to be my own particular demon, a floating sense of doom that has ruined many of what could have been, should have been, the happiest days of my life, and more than a few times in my life I have been raised from such ruins, which is another way of saying that more than a few times in my life I have been raised from death - death of the spirit anyway, death of the heart - by the healing power that Jesus calls us both to heal with and to be healed by.
Frederick Buechner
If your needs are little, you are rich enough.
Fakeer Ishavardas
I must say that my father is innocent. I should say it. I have to say it. I’m obliged to say it. My father will kill me if I don’t say he is innocent. The children of murderers cannot kill the father.
Alejandro Zambra
It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...
Frederick Buechner
Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.
Paul Graham
What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.
George Saunders
Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
For five years, I have been sick and I have been trying to will myself to be better. To think harder about being better, to improve more. To become a better breather, reactor, meditator, hoping that if I just try hard enough, the symptoms will go away and I’ll feel like myself again, like a self I remember as if out of a rearview mirror except with this one, the objects are smaller than they appear. I have tried to force myself to be more clearheaded, energetic, grounded. Tried yoga, acupuncture, cognitive behavioral therapy, talk therapy, and long walks in the woods. And every few months, when I finally felt I’d reached a zenith of my abilities with yoga, CBT, or talk therapy, I would give it another shot: go to another doctor, a Western doctor, one with an M.D. and a white coat, and I would tell him or her my symptoms (for the gender of the doctor does not matter only, it would seem, my gender), and hope that once again, the doctor would pay attention, would take my case, would try to help me so that I didn’t have to so deeply and fervently try to help myself.
Eva Hagberg
Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.
Dejan Stojanovic
God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas but for scars.
Elbert Hubbard
The opportunity for evil in itself does not suffice; people need a rationale as well. Consider how unpleasant, how awkward it must be when your neighbor, catching his breath (and that can happen anytime), screams, 'Why?' - or, 'Aren't you ashamed?!' It's embarrassing to stand there without a ready answer. A crowbar makes a poor rebuttal, everybody senses that. The whole trick lies in having the proper grounds to brush aside such aggravating objections. Contemptuously. Everyone wants to commit a villainy without having to feel like a villain.
Stanisław Lem
Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work— What are these Martians? What are we? I answered, clearing my throat.
H.G.Wells
... the love of money is the root of all evils." - John de Alençon, Pg, 64
The Medieval Murderers
Don't worry, I can hander it!
Hidekaz Himaruya
Chemistry's a tricky thing, and if I'm not feeling it, I'm not gonna pretend.
Faith Sullivan
If a messiah exhorts you to kill people of another belief system, get this idiot non-prophet out of your stupid system.
Fakeer Ishavardas
You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on… places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills… a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.
Rebecca McNutt
When you are in trouble, you need to put all your energies into thinking that there is a way out. Then, the bottom, the dark hole, becomes just a springboard from which you can leap so high that your head might hit a cloud.
Fatema Mernissi
My head ached. I was thinking of the pain, and wondering how it was possible for physical agony to be so intense. I had never imagined that such a torture could be endured. Yet here was I, both conscious and able to think clearly. And not only to think, but to observe the process and make calculations about it. The steel circle round my skull was closing in with faint cracking noises. How much farther could it shrink? I counted the cracking sounds. Since I took the triple dose of pain-killer, there had been two more. …I took out my watch and laid it on the table.“Give me morphia,” I said in a calm, hostile, icy tone.“You mustn’t take morphia! You know perfectly well. The very idea! And what are you doing with that watch?”“You will give me morphia within three minutes.”They looked me uneasily up and down. No one moved. Three minutes went by. Then ten more. I slipped the watch calmly into my pocket and rose unsteadily to my feet.“Then take me to the Fiakker Bar. They say it’s a good show, and to-night I want to enjoy myself.”The others jumped up with a feeling of relief.I never confessed the secret to anyone, either then or afterwards. I had made up my mind at the end of those three minutes — for the first and last time in my life — that if my headache had not stopped within the next ten I should throw myself under the nearest tram.It never came out whether I should have kept to my resolve, for the pain left with the suddenness of lighting.
Frigyes Karinthy
Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.
Barnett Newman
When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)
Joseph Campbell
Many people die of thirst but the Irish are born with one.
Spike Milligan
To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.
Dejan Stojanovic
When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.
P.D. Ouspensky
For most men the world is centered in self, which is misery: to have one's world centered in God is peace.
Donald Hankey
Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.
Rebecca Goldstein
An old friend never can be found and nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost.
Samuel Johnson
But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person.
Olive Ann Burns
Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent.
Reni Eddo-Lodge
Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,is not of the Father, but is of the world." This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language — all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.
Alberto Manguel
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
Joseph Campbell
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
John Ruskin
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
Fernando Pessoa
As long as man was in the moolight he desired to reach the moon…there was bliss in the moonlight but the moon itself was distant. Moonlight was near but man longed for the moon…man reached the moon but there he was without moonlight. If one reaches the moon one does not find moonlight any longer and if one is in moonlight one does not find the moon. It is a strange fact that one is only because of the other…one is a sign of the other yet both are forever separate. If the Beloved is the Moon, moonlight is His remembrance. When the Beloved is present His remembrance is not and when His remembrance is present the Beloved is not. Proximity to one is distance from the other, Union with one is separation from the other. Thus union is hidden in every separation and separation in every union.
Wasif Ali Wasif
Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't.
Frederick Buechner
I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.’ For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.
Ahdaf Soueif