Quotes by Writers - Page 71

I don't know what I was looking for . . . I felt empty. I guess. Not hearing from you made it all seem surreal, like you were never there, a dream, a figment of my imagination.I went to your site that day to . . . I guess, double-check.I thought. . . maybe you wrote something, a new story . . . a message . . . anything.I did find a new story . . . It wasn't about us . . .And I ended up feeling even emptier.
Stjepan Šejić
The problem was that I carried around with me a tendency to feel that other people’s respect for me would vanish if what I did was second rate. And while I accept that this “perfectionism” is likely to stimulate the production of better work, it doesn’t, unfortunately, go hand in hand with a relaxed and happy attitude to life.
John Cleese
the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair
Rohinton Mistry
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
As a journalist, I am compelled to know the answers.""As a girl, I am compelled to protect what's left of my manicure," Petra said.
Libba Bray
A tiger of a rather and a wolf of a brother. Sandwiched between the two, I wonder what my tomorrow holds.
Kazuo Koike
Running was not always the coward's route; it was a matter of survival. The fewer violent encounters one invited, the longer the life.
Marjorie M. Liu
I’m proud of them, in a way. My little gold stars for surviving. For thriving. They aren’t just mistakes.
A.R. Kahler
Behold those times re-created bythe brutal power of sunlit images,the light of life’s tragedy.The walls of the trial, the fieldof the firing squad; and the distantghost of Rome’s suburbs in a ring,gleaming white in naked light.Gunshots: our death, our survival.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Through the doorway to choice and hope were the saddest girls I have ever met. Not because someone beat them or because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother.
Lidia Yuknavitch
ThatNeed to knowYour enemyTo surviveIs bitter.
Maud Sulter
Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
Alan W. Watts
Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors!
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
See, they say it’s ‘survival of the fittest’, but you and I really know that it’s ‘survival of the most heavily armed
Lia Habel
One thing you have to realize from now on is that it doesn't matter if this is a dream or not. Survival depends on what you do, not what you think.
Rebecca McKinsey
First, a man may in some ways be superior to his fellows and still serve them, if together they serve a common cause which is greater than any one man. I believe that I serve such a cause, or I would not be doing it.
Roger Zelazny
The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.
Alan W. Watts
Don't cling to your self-concept purely because your will demands it. Demand that your environment aligns as much as possible and change what you must about yourself when the outer world can’t be changed. Mental health is about mental fluidity, mental illness stems in rigidity.
Oli Anderson
Keep your identity small.
Paul Graham
... life isn’t a battle between us and the rest of the world, but rather a battle to overcome ourselves - our inimitable egos ...
Renée Paule
If your ego is in good shape you will pretend you're surprised if a National Chairman calls you to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you're not really surprised.
Rex Stout
...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.
José Saramago
A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.
Richard Le Gallienne
When I pass, speak freely of my shortcomings and my flaws. Learn from them, for I'll have no ego to injure.
Aaron McGruder
But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes.
Daniel C. Dennett
Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm. ... In the real world, all rests on perseverance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sometimes you can't fight. Sometimes, some things, you have to outlast.
Hilari Bell
People suffer all over the world, every day. But people triumph all over the world every day, too.
Mia Sheridan
Liao writes with the courage of a man who knows loss and doesn't fear it. There is nothing to make him notice like an official injunction against noticing, nothing to make him listen like official deafness, nothing that drives him to make us see like the blindness that officialdom seeks to impose.
Liao Yiwu
... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.
José Saramago
Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.
George Saunders
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
That will be so amusing! You will have five hundred million little bells,and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens...they will all be your friends."-the little prince
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . .
H.P. Lovecraft
Mens videt astra.(The soul sees the stars.)
Merrie Haskell
Supposing I know of a flower that is absolutely unique, that is nowhere to be found except on my planet, and any minute that flower could accidentally be eaten up by a little lamb, isn't that important? If a person loves a flower that is the only one of its kind on all the millions and millions of stars, then gazing at the night sky is enough to make him happy. He says to himself "My flower is out there somewhere." But if the lamb eats the flower, then suddenly it's as if all the stars had stopped shining. Isn't that important?
Antoine De Saint Exupery
She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
And if I consume another mortal’s flesh, will I like god before me, shit a million stars upon the naked, wretched sky?
A.P. Sweet
at night i loved her at night i waited under the tarp at night i watched her looking up at the stars dreaming of a better time to watch me
A.P. Sweet
You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The truth is that he wanted to draw a little comfort from gazing at the stars. There were still one or two up there, at the zenith. As always, seeing them revived him; they were distant, they were omnipotent and at the same time they were docile to his calculations; just the contrary to humans, always too near, so weak and yet so quarrelsome.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
They forget that love is not a science but an inherent state of mind; they forget that sex is practiced by animals without textbooks and that it is not such a secret that requires a complete science, courses and special training. And so impotent, with artificial stars on the ceilings of their rooms, they become the main teachers on the way to the stars.
Dejan Stojanovic
In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire.
Olaf Stapledon
You focus on a single star,” I explained, as I searched for my spot. “Then you spin around, staring at that one star, until you can’t stand anymore.” I started spinning to demonstrate. “Then you lie down to watch the stars spinning above you while your star remains still.
Rebecca Donovan
You focus on a singer star,” I explained, as I searched for my spot. “Then you spin around, staring at that one star, until you can’t stand anymore.” I started spinning to demonstrate. “Then you lie down to watch the stars spinning above you while your star remains still.
Rebecca Donovan
How is it possible for one to own the stars?""To whom do they belong?" the businessman retorted, peevishly."I don't know. To nobody.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I wish Italy would stop being a crybaby. I wish he would kick his bad habit of wanting to eat pasta everywhere. I wish he would stop getting a stomachache every time he ate geleto. I wish he would learn to throw a grenade properly. I wish his older brother would stop trying to punch me. I wish-"*babble babble babble*"Germany . . . That's impossible . . .
Hidekaz Himaruya
When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.
Roger Zelazny
For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and ofother selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of thecategories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant.
Aldous Huxley
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way
Alan W. Watts
For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
Alan W. Watts
If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that – at a time not too distant – each one of us will simply cease to be. It won’t be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it. Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it. The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all; and even that is saying too much, because there won’t be anyone for whom it never happened. Make this prospect as real as possible: the one total certainty. You will be as if you had never existed, which was, however, the way you were before you did exist – and not only you but everything else. Nevertheless, with such an improbable past, here we are. We begin from nothing and end in nothing. You can say that again. Think it over and over, trying to conceive the fact of coming to never having existed. After a while you will begin to feel rather weird, as if this very apparent something that you are is at the same time nothing at all. Indeed, you seem to be rather firmly and certainly grounded in nothingness, much as your sight seems to emerge from that total blankness behind your eyes. The weird feeling goes with the fact that you are being introduced to a new common sense, a new logic, in which you are beginning to realize the identity of ku and shiki, void and form. All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can’t form the slight idea of it is that it’s yourself. But not the self you thought you were.
Alan W. Watts
The earth is black in front of the cliff, and no orchids grow.Creepers crawl in the brown mud by the path.Where did the birds of yesterday fly?To what other mountain did the animals go?Leopards and pythons dislike this ruined spot;Cranes and snakes avoid the desolation.My criminal thoughts of those days pastBrought on the disaster of today.
Wu Cheng'en
Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical.When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
Alan W. Watts