Quotes by Writers - Page 102

The last time I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the chateau, at my brother’s wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn’t recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn’t seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother’s choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn’t have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn’t regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer.
Édouard Levé
Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. In truth, you do still speak: through those, like me, who bring you back to life, and interrogate you. We hear your responses and admire their wisdom. If the facts turned out to contradict your counsel, we blame ourselves for having misinterpreted you. Yours are the truths, ours are the errors.
Édouard Levé
Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.
Édouard Levé
Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense. Should they be threatened by boredom, or tshould the absurdity of their lives leap out at them from the curve of some cruel mirror, let them remember you, and the pain of existence will seem preferable to the disquietude of no longer being.
Édouard Levé
You were not surprised to find yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of helplessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again.
Édouard Levé
The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Sons of suicides seldom do well.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I was so tired of fighting. Tired of hurting. Tired of the guilt that never released me, and the regrets that could not be changed. I didn't want this life. They're were only so many times I could hear that I should never have been born, before I wished it to be true.
Rebecca Donovan
You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void.
Édouard Levé
You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.
Édouard Levé
We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.
George Sand
It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.
H.P. Lovecraft
You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.
Olin Miller
When I choose to dwell in the assurance of Whose I am and who I am in Him, I have a confident heart.
Renee Swope
The worst thing to call somebody is crazy, it's dismissive. 'But I don't understand this person', so they're crazy. That's bullshit cause people are not crazy, they strong people, maybe their environment is a little sick.
Dave Chapelle
He looks between the two. "Evie," he starts, as if he's explaining something to a five year old, "You do know that they can say whatever they want to on the package, right? It doesn't mean it's true.""Well, see," I counter, "You're right. But you're also wrong. I think that 95 percent of knowing you're the greatest is all about confidence. You might suspect you're the greatest, you might hope you're the greatest, but if you don't have the balls to proclaim yourself the greatest in bold packaging, and let your critics test you if they dare, then you probably aren't the greatest. Who can resist the guy who really, truly believes in himself?
Mia Sheridan
It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. What matters is you can look in the mirror, and love who you see.
B. Dave Walters
You have 100% control over yourself, and your life. It is up to you to stop giving your power away, and to decide what you want to be, do, or have...and go after it.
B. Dave Walters
Every time when it rains it stops raining... After darkness there is always a light... Every time you sleep you get up fresh.. Never Give Up at your tough time. You are successful if you have ability to handle your nervousness and go on with confidence..
Ahad Aadi
Yeah, yeah, success is a ladder, a marathon instead of a sprint and all that crap. Everyone can TELL you stuff like that, but you really have to understand advice in relation to YOURSELF, or it's all just nice intellectual theory.
Felicia Day
And all that time I was lying to my support group. I told the ladies, "Sure! I'm writing!" when I wasn't. Yes, I could have filled all those newfound minutes with actual work, but I had no confidence in myself. I was a fraud. Who was I to pick up a pen and expect anything good to come out of it? I expected perfection as soon as the pencil hit the paper, and since that's impossible, I couldn't get myself to start. Then I felt guilty about not starting, which made me want to start even less. And with no game to bury the feelings, I got very depressed. No wonder I didn't book any acting jobs in the last half of 2006. No one wanted to hire a clinically depressed person to sell snack foods.
Felicia Day
Choosing to accept yourself is a political act. An act of liberation.
Francesca Martínez
And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted.
Francesca Martínez
To all my enemies, I will destroy you.
Frankie Boyle
I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.
Vera Brittain
One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people.
Charlie Brooker
I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.
Aleksandar Hemon
One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.
Aldous Huxley
In the light of His example we can see, in the faith of His power we too can prove, that suffering is to God’s child the token of the Father’s love, and the channel of His richest blessing. [. . .]Suffering is the way of the rent veil, the new and living way Jesus walked in and opened for us.
Andrew Murray
No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.
Herta Müller
The undisciplined mind confuses misfortune with mistakes.
Mark Caney
What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.
Denis de Rougemont
The acts of daily forbearance, the headache, or toothache, or heavy cold; the tiresome peculiarities of husband or wife, the broken glass...all of these sufferings, small as they are, if accepted lovingly, are most pleasing to God's Goodness.
Francis de Sales
Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
George Saunders
One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.
Aleksandar Hemon
Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.
Aleksandar Hemon
From the essay on Love, in which he describes as a wilderness experience his daily visits with his wife to a hospital 3,000 miles from home in a strange city, where someone he loves is in danger of dying. “When the worst finally happens, or almost happens, a kind of peace comes. I had passed beyond grief, beyond terror, all but beyond hope, and it was thee, in that wilderness, that for the first time in my life I caught sight of something of what it must be like to love God truly. It was only a glimpse, but it was like stumbling on fresh water in the desert, like remembering something so huge and extraordinary that my memory had been unable to contain it. Though God was nowhere to be clearly seen, nowhere to be clearly heard, I had to be near him—even in the elevator riding up to her floor, even walking down the corridor to the one door among all those doors that had her name taped on it. I loved him because there was nothing else left. I loved him because he seemed to have made himself as helpless in his might as I was in my helplessness. I loved him not so much in spite of there being nothing in it for me but almost because there was nothing in it for me. For the first time in my life, there in that wilderness, I caught a glimpse of what it must be like to love God truly, for his own sake, to love him no matter what. If I loved him with less than all my heart, soul, and will, I loved him with at least as much of them as I had left for loving anything…I did not love God, God knows, because I was some sort of saint or hero. I did not love him because I suddenly saw the light (there was almost no light at all) or because I hoped by loving him to persuade him to heal the young woman I loved. I loved him because I couldn’t help myself. I loved him because the one who commands us to love is the one who also empowers us to love, as there in the wilderness of that dark and terrible time I was, through no doing of my own, empowered to love him at least a little, at least enough to survive. And in the midst of it, these small things happened that were as big as heaven and earth because through them a hope beyond hopelessness happened. “O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.”…The final secret, I think, is this: that the words “You shall love the Lord your God” become in the end less a command than a promise.
Frederick Buechner
I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain.
Fernando Pessoa
The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.
José Saramago
There is, in fact, no safeword for chemical burns under one’s fingernails.
Agnostic Zetetic
I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children's lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to give my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I'm a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don't exist.
Liane Moriarty
The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling out the manner in which the natural organism itself wants to react and which its innate wisdom has provided.
Alan W. Watts
Who ain't a slave? Tell me that... I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
Herman Melville
You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.
Frederick Buechner
If by years of patient suffering, God can manage to take the harshness out of my voice, then the time has been well-spent.
Eula Biss
And I read hundreds and thousands of books, day and night, always awake and always eager to seek health. But in no book I found what I was looking for. Then, shut up in my parents' house, I thought and suffered for hundreds and thousands of hours, always awake and always mindful of the tremendous anxiety of health. But I still have not found what I was looking for.
Giovanni Papini
As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.
H.G.Wells
He’s suffering from Politician’s Logic. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.
Antony Jay
Why they were loaded with bags of beans and peas and anything else they happened to pick up when they were still some distance away from the street where the first blind man and his wife lived, for that is where they are going, is a question that could only occur to someone who has never in his life suffered shortages.
José Saramago
Broken MelodyBroken melody — tear sparkling in the eyeOf a woman loved…Please past,Jewel lost,A trampled dreamLips unkissedIn the broken melody.With silent sobs the naked shoulders shake,Their whiteness dazzling…Stabbed, stabbed with remorseFor the moments of mindlessness,For her ruined fate,For the happiness lostIn the broken melody.Face hidden in her hands in shame,Remorsefully the woman weeps,With heart despairing(A broken guitar,A voice stifledOn lips kissed by painIn the broken melody).Silent he stands beside the woman weepingScolding tears of shameThat dim her eyes.Some money on the table quickly laysAnd goes away,Leaving the woman lostIn the broken melody.But when another comes, lust mounts again,The heated bloodPounds furiously through the veins,Benumbing mind… and only gaspsAnd grants are heardIn the horrid melody.(Translated by R.Elsie)
Millosh Gjergj Nikolla (Migjeni)
If one suffers from the pain and the hardship, its friends feel empathy and sadness too. Whereas, its opponents celebrate and enjoy that.
Ehsan Sehgal
It seems improbable, unless one knows how obstinately, purposefully and unerringly any stricken animal will find its way to the same place where in the past it has endured suffering and recovered.
Georgi Vladimov
When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are are released from desire and fear. And your life becomes harmonious, centered and affirmative. Even with suffering. The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva - the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
Joseph Campbell
So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. they err who would assert that invariable this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. An when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bides the soul be rid of it.
Herman Melville
Once past the comfort zone in either direction, humans soon lost the ability to discriminate bad from worse.
Roger Zelazny
Injustice in the end produces independence.
Voltaire
You can never forget the past unless you face up to it.
Fan Wu
He noticed that she threw away the crumbled bus ticket on the street as soon as she got down. He picked it up and put it in his pocket along with his own a memorabilia of their first date together, just like a strand of her hair he would find later on his shirt and the broken pen cap that she would go on to search in the laboratory and so many other such small things which he would collect.
Faraaz Kazi
He took the last seat, as usual, a subtle reminder of what he was and what he had become.
Faraaz Kazi
When I look back on the stuff I used to wear, I wonder why somebody didn't try to stop me. Just a friendly warning, "You may regret this," would have been fine.
Ellen DeGeneres