Quotes by Writers - Page 62

Do you ever feel that way?""Lonely?"I search for the words. "Restless. As if you haven't really met yourself yet. As is you'd passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt - 'Ah! There I Am! I've been missing that piece!' But it happens too fast, and then that part of you disappears into the fog again. And you spend the rest of your days looking for it."He nods, and I think he's appeasing me. I feel stupid of having said it. It's sentimental and true, and I've revealed a part of myself I shouldn't have."Do you know what I think?" Kartik says at last."What?""Sometimes, I think you can glimpse it in another.
Libba Bray
What's the difference between sanity and madness anyway? We all play headgames with ourselves. We all have baggage. We all cope somehow. I'm not sure if I'm mad or sane. I mean, I hold my life together, I pay my bills, I raise my kids. But the world is so polarized and bizarre now that for some people, none of these these things matter if they're not wearing the right shoes or don't have the right credit score or a fancy family car. Some people think the most important things to worry about are handbags and tan lines. Meanwhile, war and crime and poverty unfold all around us, and we ignore it. In that environment, how can we even begin to talk about sanity and madness?
A.S. King
A personality disorder is not the foreign presence of demonic possession or a cancerous cluster of cells spreading among the internal organs. It is a pattern of cognition and reaction that impares the capacity to be productive, happy and generally at ease. It is a fractured sense of self giving way to the weight of stressful interpersonal dynamics.
Merri Lisa Johnson
The unique stigma of PTSD. The stigma of PTSD remains one of the most formidable barriers to effective care.
Michael A. Cucciare
This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks. “I know,” I said. “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said. “I know,” I said. There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When mental [illness] increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.
George Sand
...if in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, 'Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?' I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason there is no probability that the desire of proving his free agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt: if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warranty to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly. Madness is a state, that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will. A fanatic or a hero, braves death as necessarily as a more phlegmatic man or a coward flies from it.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I have no doubt that they'll tell you a lot of kind things about me when my back is turned. They may not have been behind the door when God passed out the pretty faces, but Heaven only knows where they were when He divided up the gratitude.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I understand that you don’t want to marry me,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know why, since I’m simply delightful to be around. But to each his own taste.
Merrie Haskell
Is this the baby?" I said.Ma turned on me again."What do you think it is?" she said. "A midget that can't talk?
George Saunders
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Felicity and Ann hunched over their ornaments as if they were fascinating relics from an archaeological dig. I note that their shoulders are trembling, and I realize that they are fighting laughter over my terrible plight. There's friendship for you.
Libba Bray
Any boy who'd love a sailboat-patterned, swimsuited sausage who tames rabid foxes would be wonderful. And impossible.
Fanny Britt
Why fall? Let's rise in love together; and while we're at it, let's come up with lamer quotations.
Ahmed Mostafa
No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Sarcasm is the new staircase to stardom.
Ahmed Mostafa
From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.
Publilius Syrus
Divide and rule, the politician cries;Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.
Fernando Pessoa
... When Princes devote themselves rather to pleasure than to arms, they lose their dominions.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... War is the sole art looked for in one who rules...
Niccolò Machiavelli
Jill!” I called to her through our connecting bathroom as I pulled on some jeans. “You realize I’ve been more than twenty-four hours without a shower, right?” “Oh, who cares,” she grumbled. “You look fine. Just put on some deodorant and a bra. I mean, aren’t we just going to be getting sweaty lugging your stuff down from storage anyway?
J.M. Richards
I swear I've good morals. It's just that bad ones befriend me. I'm a friendly person, you know. But I will talk to them. Believe you me.
Fakeer Ishavardas
They lay on their heathery beds and listened to all the sounds of the night. They heard the little grunt of a hedgehog going by. They saw the flicker of bats overhead. They smelt the drifting scent of honeysuckle, and the delicious smell of wild thyme crushed under their bodies. A reed-warbler sang a beautiful little song in the reeds below, and then another answered.
Enid Blyton
The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very bright, riding through the empty blue sky.
H.G.Wells
He's looking into the night, in case a shadow comes to listen and look.
Herta Müller
The only thing I’d understand right from the very beginning was that our love was supported by loneliness. That neither one of us could haul ourselves up out of the deadly numbness we felt when we lay together, so silent, in darkness so isolating it seemed to shine. This was the edge of night.
Banana Yoshimoto
Man thalabal ‘ula sahiral layali.” He who wants glory will work late into the night. -184
Ahmad Fuadi
it'll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night
Banana Yoshimoto
Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.
Joë Bousquet
When dawn comes, that memory gradually distances...Tonight, I will bring it to sleep with me, so that will not be taken away by the waves of the night...
Ai Yazawa
Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbes and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.
Brassaï
That's the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done
Banana Yoshimoto
Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped,deserves to be whipped.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
A horrible end is better than endless horror.
Oliver Markus
Free will? Either you follow the word of God, or you'll be punished with eternal hellfire. That's the same kind of "choice" an abuse boyfriend gives you: 'Either you do exactly what I say, or I'll beat the shit out of you.
Oliver Gaspirtz
...there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In all things it is better to hope than to despair.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Two-thirds of all preachers, doctors and lawyers are hanging on to the coat tails of progress, shouting, whoa! while a good many of the rest are busy strewing banana peels along the line of march.
Elbert Hubbard
Progress is a wonderful thing of course, and I can appreciate the lactiferins that are sprinkled on the pasture to turn the grass to cheese. And yet this lack of cows, however rational it may be, gives one the feeling that the fields and meadows, deprived of their phlegmatic, bemusedly ruminating presence, are pitifully empty.
Stanisław Lem
Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.
Alberto Manguel
It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its use for the magic opening of the temple doors, when the priests lit the fires on the altars, to deceive the populace into ascribing to a deity what was the work of the engineer. In much the same way today, the almost boundless fecundity of the creative scientific discoveries and inventions of the age are being appropriated for the purpose of the mysterious opening of doors into the holy of holies of the temples of mammon by a hierarchy of imposters and humbugs, whom it is the first task of a sane civilization to expose and clear out.
Frederick Soddy
Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living. On the contrary, they grow at so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of simple and compound interest ... It is this underlying confusion between wealth and debt which has made such a tragedy of the scientific era.
Frederick Soddy
The Socialist system requires that each individual act out of selfless, altruistic motives. It sounds nice, but the only way that could happen is if Man were innately centered on others.
Mark David Henderson
Whatever Latin America sells—raw materials or manufactures—its chief export product is really cheap labor.
Eduardo Galeano
Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a curse to mankind.
John Adams
The boy answers, "Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt."Indra says, "I ask. Teach." (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)
Joseph Campbell
The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real.
Clay Shirky
But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours -- that's another matter.
H.G.Wells
The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.
Oliver Burkeman
Ask one question: Would a Millennial (anyone born between 1980 and 2000) look forward to working here?Try this exercise. Take a group of people into a large, open room with tackable wall surfaces or whiteboards. Give them large sheets of paper, sticky notes, markers, and tape. Ask them to create a concept for a work environment (don't say “office”) using the following words: high-energy, collaborative, healthy, productive, engaging, innovative, interactive, high-tech, and regenerating.
Rex Miller Sr.
Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.” ― John Cleese
John Cleese
...There's an -or- in -whore- because you always have a choice to respect your body and say no.
Libba Bray
Abstaining from sex, hitting the books, and wearing loose-fitting clothes are common ways that girls try to molt their "slutty" image. But more often their shame leads them to self-destructive behavior. They become willing to do things that they wouldn't have dreamed of doing before they were scandalized because they now feel they have so little to offer. Some girls do drugs or drink to excess in an attempt to blot away their stigma. Others become depressed and anorexic. And others think so little of themselves that they date boys who insult or beat them.
Leora Tanenbaum
Intercourse was now forbidden to everyone but married people; bundling disappeared. In its place young courting couples engaged in "petting"--which, interpreted broadly, meant that they were could do anything sexual short of intercourse. Women were now held responsible for controlling men's beastly sexuality--halting them from simply plunging ahead--at the same time that they were expected to be sexually innocent: an impossible position.
Leora Tanenbaum
I don't switch much, don't really want many people to fuck me, because there's a whole code, unwritten but no less rigid than if it were chiseled in stone, about how Tops Must be, how Butches Must Be, and it does not include taking off one's pants. It does not include admitting to one's own desires, only quietly serving the desires of others. It certainly does not include taking a break once in a while to inhabit some other gender, role, or sensibility, even for half a delightful, sweaty hour, in the company of someone who feels like a mirror of me rather than a complementary piece I can fit myself against.
S. Bear Bergman
The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman, or to any other form of experience.
Alan W. Watts
There is abundant scholarship which establishes that the delegitimation of homosexual desire and the production of the naturally heterosexual, properly bi-gendered (unambiguously male or female) population of citizens, with the women respectably desexualized, is a process that is central to nation formation all over the globe.
Nivedita Menon
I'm fairly fond of boys, but my preference is for girls; When I have enough of a girl, she serves me still as a boy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe