Quotes by Writers - Page 122

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
Fernando Pessoa
If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible, all transmitted through the generations. Books amplified the light of mind, reinforced the soul.
Mark Cantrell
Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.
George Saunders
(Emerson's) aphorisms tend to be chicken soup for the academic soul or gobledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.
Micah Mattix
The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.
Maurice Blanchot
Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much 'catching up' to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life just reading all the classics, or one pretends to be 'contemporary and hip' and never reads any of the classics because in order to pretend to be contemporary one has to at least superficially read the works of contemporaries. Hence the dilemma: one either does not care about being fashionable, or one is fashionable and just learns to mimic some knowledge about the classics. As time develops this rift just becomes bigger, because the amount of books written grows and grows to insane proportions. Conclusion: one can only be hip in the future if one does not read at all, which is a phenomenon I am already witnessing in the media.
Martijn Benders
Of Books and Scribes there are no end:This Plague--and who can doubt it?Dismays me so, I've sadly pennedAnother book about it.
Robert W. Service
If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.
Georges Bataille
He suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad.
Mark Beauregard
It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical.
Aldous Huxley
Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
with you, the sense i have lost my place in a bookor simply lost — misplaced the memorywhich isn't in the last place where I looked.a thought that the clouds don't move — that it is wewho thunder past — there it is! an old vacation,a train ride — sense of immobility.as sky and forest scroll past in relation,we are not moved, pretend to love the view,resort at length to scripted conversationby a poet-turned-screenwriter who didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrongand now drafts action film scripts wholly two-dimensional unless you choose to don the 3d glasses that do not stay on —
Joshua Ip
Literature that awakens and inflames feelings is the food of hearts.
Ahmed Mayouf
These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.—Literature and Evil
Georges Bataille
For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.”— Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain
Anatole Broyard
Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
A.S. Byatt
Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature but one's own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence.
F.L. Lucas
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.
José Rizal
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.
Frederick Buechner
Capitalist ideology in general, Zizek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.
Mark Fisher
Doubt keeps us from believing things can get better.
Renee Swope
I do not go to church. I don’t go to Christian church or Jew church or any other church. I don’t go to church at all. Not ever. A perfect Sunday for me is spent drinking green tea while reading the Sunday New York Times. Yikes! Why don’t I just turn in my Al-Qaeda membership form and call it a day? As if that wasn’t bad enough, not only do I not go to church:I don’t believe in God. How can I say the Pledge of Allegiance if I don’t believe in God? How can I spend our American currency which pledges “In God We Trust?” How can I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me God? Answer: I can’t. It’s a real problem. Don’t get me wrong – I’d like to believe in God. I wish I did, especially if He was the kind of God that thought America was #1. But I don’t, which to many people is the same as not believing in America. Up until recently, I thought those people were lunatics.
Michael Ian Black
If one believes in a god, one is a Theist. If one does not believe in a god, then one is an A-theist — he is without that belief. The distinction between atheism and theism is entirely, exclusively, that of whether one has or has not a belief in God.
Chapman Cohen
If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.
Denis Diderot
No religion can fully accept another religion, that’s the one belief all religions share
Ben Mitchell
I tried to believe in God, but I confess to you that God meant nothing in my life, and that in my secret heart I too felt a void where my childhood faith had been. But probably this feeling belongs only to individuals in transition. The grandchildren of these pessimists will frolic in the freedom of their lives, and have more happiness than poor Christians darkened with fear of Hell.
Voltaire
True love is like ghosts which many believe in, but few have seen.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Even with the very best of intentions, even with the ambition of making the world a better place, when we cast judgment upon people whose lifestyles, beliefs, or predilections we dislike, we add to the emotional filth of hostility and make the world feel a little less safe for the folks we’re genuinely trying to help.
Agnostic Zetetic
Our love is the reason romance was created.
Faraaz Kazi
Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the complexity of the problems.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.
Aldous Huxley
In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.
Aldous Huxley
Faith is a state of openness or trust.To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on.In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Alan W. Watts
Come what will, one comfort's always left — that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.
Herman Melville
How do you have to live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think?
Herta Müller
Do not believe anything merely because you are told it is so, because others believe it, because it comes from Tradition, or because you have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect. Believe, take for your doctrine, and hold true to that, which, after serious investigation, seems to you to further the welfare of all beings. (47)
Jean-Yves Leloup
I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.
Stanisław Lem
Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.
Aleksandar Hemon
You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.
Libba Bray
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Alan W. Watts
All those people who are chained here thinking that their reputations matter and this little shit matters are so freaking shortsighted. Dude, what matters is that you're happy. What matters is your future. What matters is that we get out of here in one piece. What matters is finding the truth of our own lives, not caring about what other people think is the truth of us.
A.S. King
I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is little faith involved in setting out on a journey where the destination is certain and every step in between has been mapped in detail. Bravery, trust, is about leaving camp in the dark, when we do not know the route ahead and cannot be certain we will ever return.
Bear Grylls
My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration.
H.G.Wells
How merciful a thing is man's ignorance of his immediate future! What a ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds! For nothing short of pre-knowledge could have stopped the occurrence, so suddenly it sprang upon them.
Mervyn Peake
The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of the future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.
J. Michael Straczynski
What has been done is little—scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us.
Agnes Mary Clerke
There is beauty everywhere on earth, but there is greater beauty in those places where one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one’s dreams until some improbable future – a future inexorably shrinking away; where the fear that has pervaded one’s life suddenly vanishes because there is... nothing to be afraid of.
Josef Škvorecký
The influence of the future on the past," said Morel enthusiastically, almost inaudibly.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Heaven knows where I'll end up - it's a safe bet I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
H.P. Lovecraft
Never carry the baggage of your past relationships on the honeymoon of your future relationships.
Faraaz Kazi
I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand...
Lena Dunham
Though sometimes when he wakes in the night all he can think about is death. His own death, of course, but also the death of those around him,the fact that one day in the not-too-distant future every person he knows, every single one, will be dead and gone, along with all the people he doesn't know,to be replaced by a crop of strangers who will take over the structures left behind.
A.S.A. Harrison