Quotes by Writers - Page 103

Night is when the whispers of the past become the echoes of the present.
Faraaz Kazi
As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn't experienced ten years of living.
Liane Moriarty
Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.
H.P. Lovecraft
If you would understand the present, you must come to know the past.
Libba Bray
I Tried, But What I Had with You I Couldn’t Have with Anyone Else.
Ahmed Ali Anjum
I had run to boarding school to escape myself. But I couldn't escape who I was or what I'd done, no matter how fast or far I ran. The crows were just a reminder of that. They wanted back in.My past wasn't done with me.Not yet.
A.R. Kahler
According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker. - The World And The Door
o.henry
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H.G.Wells
There are some things in the past that… that just aren’t meant to be viewed.
Rebecca McNutt
The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.
Hilary Mantel
Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?
Roger Zelazny
It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Not watching the path where his legs took him, he walked on because he knew he had to walk ahead, leaving his past behind.
Faraaz Kazi
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
Frederick Buechner
I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Some guys like to undermine a girl's self-esteem with little verbal jabs. Eventually it all adds up. One bee sting doesn't hurt a horse, but enough bee stings can kill a horse.
Oliver Gaspirtz
Just be yourself -- it's the only way it can work.
Johnny Carson
That is because no one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone's gonna think of to say about me, I've already said to me, about me, probably within the last half hour.
Lena Dunham
It is essential to our health and happiness that we dedicate ourselves to some kind of mission or purpose that transcends the mundane hustle and bustle of daily living.
Oli Anderson
Her two outstanding characteristics were self-confidence and candor. The latter sometimes got her into hot water Durrance later told Charlotte, but the former kept it from scalding her.
Olive Higgins Prouty
When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto, what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.
Lena Dunham
What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?
Wyndham Lewis
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
Frederick Douglass
We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.
Alan W. Watts
And the voice spoke even more deliberately: '...but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.'And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my mind's eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
H.P. Lovecraft
[T]here is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is This Is It.
Joseph Campbell
You really can't follow a guru. You can't ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life--there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.
Joseph Campbell
I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?
A.M. Homes
It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.
Joseph Campbell
What distresses us is not loosing life, but losing what gives it meaning.
Raymond Radiguet
If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.
Loren Eiseley
Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.
José Saramago
when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.
Voltaire
Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.
Voltaire
We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
Alan W. Watts
I think of you as a friend. I used to think "friend" was just another word... Nothing more, nothing less. But when I met you, I realized what was important was the word's meaning.
Masashi Kishimoto
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn
Orson Welles
Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: "I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.
Voltaire
Our Soul Allies light the fire in those initial visits, but it’s up to us to keep it burning.
S. Kelley Harrell
Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.
George Saunders
The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possessions of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.
Joseph Campbell
old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him -- or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.
José Saramago
You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.
A.S. Byatt
The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.
Evgeny Morozov
Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are a subject to a good many different ailments, but I have never heard of one who has suffered from insomnia.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Secrets. Funny how, when you're about to be given something precious, something you've wanted for a long time, you suddenly feel nervous over taking it.Everyone wants more than anything to be allowed into someone else's most secret self. Everyone wants to allow someone into their most secret self. Everyone feels so alone inside that their deepest wish is for someone to know their secret being, because then they are alone no longer. Don't we all long for this? Yet when it's offered it's frightening, because you might not live up to the desires of the one who bestows the gift. And frightening because you know that accepting such a gift means you'll want-perhaps be expected- to offer a similar gift in return. Which means giving your *self* away. And what's more frightening than that?” ― Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
Aidan Chambers
At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.
Fernando Pessoa
If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here unprobational, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
Alan W. Watts
And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.
Alan W. Watts
As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked issomething startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious andbasic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it aHintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our mindswhich we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" asa lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful andcommonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech andthought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experienceselfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. Iseem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—arare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe ofbiological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual,sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only tovanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and evenabsurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in thewhole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclearfields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old;my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply thepulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.
Alan W. Watts
Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.
Fernando Pessoa
Meanwhile, the self can stand in the way of the Not-Self, interfering with the free flow of spiritual grace, this maintaining the self in a state of blindness, and also with the flow of animal grace, which leads to the impairment of natural functions and, in the long run, of the slower processes called structure. For each individual human being, the main practical problems are these: How can I prevent my ego from eclipsing the inner light, synteresis, scintilla animae, and so perpetuating the state of unregenerate illusion and blindness? And these practical problems remain unchallenged, even if we abandon the notion of an entelechy or physiological intelligencer, of an atman or pneuma and think, instead, in terms [of] systems...
Aldous Huxley
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - "Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi".
Cyril Connolly
The greatest form of betrayal is self-betrayal."-Dr Renu S Persaud
Renu Persaud PhD
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.
Daniel C. Dennett
Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.
Fernando Pessoa
I’ve always been a slow learner in some areas of my life.mostly the areas known as myself. Or maybe I should say ‘selves.’because the fact is, I’ve never, even as a child, felt I’m only one self, only one person. I’ve always felt I’m quite a few more than one. For example, there’s my jokey self, there’s my morose and fed-up self,there’s my lewd and disgusting self. There’s my clever-clogs self, and my fading-violet-who-cant-make-up-her-mind-about-anything self. There’s my untidy-clothes-everywhere-all-over-my-room self, and my manically tidy self when I want my room to be minimalist and Zen to the nth degree. There’s my confidant, arrogant self and my polite and reasonable and good listener self. There’s my self-righteous self and my wickedly bad self, my flaky self and my bsentimental self. There are selfs I like and selfs I don’t like.there’s my little-girl selfnwhonlikes to play silly games and there’s my old-woman self when I’m quite sure I’m eighty and edging towards geriatric.The self I show in action at any moment depends on where I am, who I’m with, the circumstances of the situation and the mood I’m in.
Aidan Chambers