Quotes by Writers - Page 101

We have come from all the countries of the world and are going to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. Nomads of the enigma, we gather there each year after having carried our mystery through ordinary countryside and fluid towns. Since we become transformed by our wanderings we are despised by those who stand still and retain a memory of giant serpents and metallic green.
Raymond Queneau
Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.
Rex Stout
Every mystery novel I ever read, the great detective was such an arrogant fuck you could replace 70% of his dialogue with 'Are you stupid?' and the conversation would still make sense.
NisiOisiN
No sheep may leave the flock," he said to anyone who would listen, "unless he comes back again.
Leonie Swann
She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A pleasant morning. Saw my classmates Gardner, and Wheeler. Wheeler dined, spent the afternoon, and drank Tea with me. Supped at Major Gardiners, and engag'd to keep School at Bristol, provided Worcester People, at their ensuing March meeting, should change this into a moving School, not otherwise. Major Greene this Evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and Satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the Argument he advanced was, 'that a mere creature, or finite Being, could not make Satisfaction to infinite justice, for any Crimes,' and that 'these things are very mysterious.'(Thus mystery is made a convenient Cover for absur
John Adams
I would prefer not to.
Herman Melville
Though it doesn’t feel like it, crisis places us front and center of desire, which is the force of power.
S. Kelley Harrell
The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure.
Frank Harris
I eyed her like a thirsty traveler in the desert looks at a pail of water.
Faraaz Kazi
The moral, I suppose, would be that the first requirements for a heroic career are the knightly virtues of loyalty, temperance, and courage. The loyalty in this case is of two degrees or commitments: first, to the chosen adventure, but then, also, to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now, this second commitment seems to put Gawain's way in opposition to the way of the Buddha, who when ordered by the Lord of Duty to perform the social duties proper to his caste, simply ignored the command, and that night achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth. Gawain is a European and, like Odysseus, who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the Sun to his marriage with Penelope, he has accepted, as the commitment of his life, not release from but loyalty to the values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen, whether following the middle way of the Buddha or the middle way of Gawain, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.
Joseph Campbell
I can discover within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.
Samuel Johnson
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu! Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.
Walter Raleigh
Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.
Fernando Pessoa
What', said he, ' makes the difference between man and all the rest of the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporeal necessities with myself; he is hungry and crops the grass, he is thirsty and drinks the stream, his thirst and hunger are appeased, he is satisfied and sleeps; he rises again and is hungry, he is again fed and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fullness. The intermediate hours are tedious and gloomy; I long again to be hungry that I may again quicken my attention. The birds peck the berries or the corn, and fly away to the groves where they sit in seeming happiness on the branches, and waste their lives in tuning one unvaried series of sounds. I likewise can call the lutanist and the singer, but the sounds that pleased me yesterday weary me today, and will grow yet more wearisome tomorrow. I can discover within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.
Samuel Johnson
He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.
Aleksandar Hemon
Who ask don't getwho don't ask don't wantwho don't want don't getwho don't getdon't care
Merle Hodge
But show me just this one thing, my darling, i seek a heart stained like a poppy flower.
Fatima Bhutto
runaway my phantom bride and take your bouquet of poisonous flowers float away specter and take the rest of my desire
A.P. Sweet
What was he? A mere human, stuck between the rungs of blended adolescence and nascent adulthood. What power did he command over the mysterious forces of love? Which sword could shatter the impenetrable armour of desire?
Faraaz Kazi
Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum.
Frederick Douglass
He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well.
Baltasar Gracián
It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Why... is human desire so unsatisfying?
Ai Yazawa
Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.
Aldous Huxley
There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The poor lack much, the greedy everything.
Publilius Syrus
Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.
Voltaire
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
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important. It's hard to understand failure when you're going through it, but in the grand scheme of things it's good to fall down—not because you're drunk and not near stairs.
Ellen DeGeneres
That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.
A. Whitney Brown
...no matter how much success you may experience in life, your eventual story - no offence intended - will be one of failure. Your bodily organs will fail, and you'll die.
Oliver Burkeman
I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead.
George Saunders
As long as we confider failure as an option, success is not going to be the only one choice.
Ahmed Alibage
I've always felt like a failure inside if I'm not already a success, if that makes any sense.
Felicia Day
I'll be living quietly in a house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I'll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories.
Fernando Pessoa
When one dream dies we replace it with another.
Oli Anderson
I've known a lot of alleged failures in my time and many of them, in losing what the world has always considered success, have achieved in facing up to failure, more than they ever achieved when they were considered successful.
Faith Baldwin
Our modern day, hyper-rat-race culture often leads us to mistakenly confuse'busy' for 'success'. The truth of the matter is that if you're constantly having to tell people how busy you are and how overwhelmed with work or stressed you are, what you're really telling them is that you can't cope with what's on your plate. You're ‘failing’.
Oli Anderson
For what is more lovable than failure?
Mervyn Peake
If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.Rid yourself of this I-am-a-poor-worm-in-the-dust idea. You are a god, with infinite capabilities. "All things are ready if the mind be so." The eagle looks the cloudless sun in the face.
J. Berg Esenwein
You must become a free man so that you have “Sidik Paningal; Java” (lucidity and precision of sight). Later, you achieve the peak of detachment of sight (Ma’rifat), where you see something to the horizon with great clarity. Do not take another step before you are certain that the path you take is the right one. Failure is another matter; what matters is precision.
Emha Ainun Nadjib
If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.
H.G.Wells
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
Because it was all I wanted to fucking know. It was all I wanted to know in this fucking world: where did the beautiful boys go? Where did the beautiful boys go? Where the hell did they go?
Brendan Cowell
He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his experience. His wretched home, his still more wretched school-days, the years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of selfish dishonour leading to another; it was all clear and pitiless now, all its squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to the hut, to the fight with the Porroh man, to the retreat down the river to Sulyma, to the Mendi assassin and his red parcel, to his frantic endeavours to destroy the head, to the growth of his hallucination. It was a hallucination! He knew it was. A hallucination merely. For a moment he snatched at hope. He looked away from the glass, and on the bracket, the inverted head grinned and grimaced at him... With the stiff fingers of his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb of his arteries. The morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.("Pollock And The Porrah Man")
H.G.Wells
You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded. Your suicide was scandalously beautiful…You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.
Édouard Levé
Nobody has ever killed themselves over a broken arm. But every day, thousands of people kill themselves because of a broken heart. Why? Because emotional pain hurts much worse than physical pain.
Oliver Markus
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams
Suicide isn't something people do to hurt other people. It's something people do to release themselves from pain.
A.S. King
Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions:The first one is: Who started it?The second is: Are we going to make it?The third is: Where are we going to put it?The fourth is: Who's going to clean up?And the fifth: Is it serious?Out Of Your Mind (2004), Audio lecture 1: The Nature of Consciousness: A Game That's Worth The Candle.
Alan W. Watts
I see two lovers looking over the edge of the cauldron of hell. Are they contemplating a double suicide? This means their love will end in hell.' I couldn't stop laughing.
Banana Yoshimoto
Suicide" Kissshot said disappointedly .Her eyes were downcast , facing the town spread out below her ."A common reason , one accounting for nine-tenths of vampire deaths"."....."."Incidentally , the remaining tenth succumb to vampire slayers - any other reason fit within the margins of a rounding error"."Suicide ? Why ?"."Do they not speak of dying of boredom ?".Boredom was a killer .Guilt could kill you - but boredom was lethal .
NisiOisiN
The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.
Voltaire
One, who suicides, is itself a killer and itself a victim. To trigger that has its decision, and own willingness, no one else.
Ehsan Sehgal
Mary Hepburn was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her bed with the polyethylene sheath of her "Jackie dress" swapped around her head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, and she hallucinated that she was a great land tortoise lying on its back in the hot and humid hold of a sailing ship of long ago. She pawed the air in perfect futility, just as a land tortoise on its back would have done.As she had often told her students, sailing ships bound out across the Pacific used to stop off in the Galàpagos Islands to capture defenseless tortoises, who could live on their backs without food or water for months. They were so slow and tame and huge and plentiful. The sailors would capsize them without fear of being bitten or clawed. then they would drag them down to waiting longboats on the shore, using the animals' own useless suits of armor for sleds.They would store them on their backs in the dark paying no further attention to them until it was time for them to be eaten. the beauty of the tortoises to the sailors was that they were fresh meat which did not have to be refrigerated or eaten right away.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Is this some kind of joke?""That's for me to know and you to find out.""Maybe you think it's funny to put up signs about people who want to commit sui
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.
Rebecca Makkai
He look'd a little disorder'd, when he said this, but I did not apprehend any thing from it at that time, believing as it us'd to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them.
Daniel Defoe