Em Mat > Em's Quotes

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“I swing down viciously but narrowly miss. It goes for another dive and I take my shot whacking it head-on in the face. The impact of my swing rattles through the bones in my arm as the shockwave from the strike explodes in a brilliant flash of coppery shimmers, chromatic sparks, and fiery swirls.”
― Yann Tanguay, Passings and the Eggplant

“This is the first time we’ve spoken in years and it feels tedious, like a mutually assigned chore.”
― Yann Tanguay, Passings and the Eggplant

“At the heel end of the day, I need my glass of wine. Christmas lights for the brain.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“I sometimes see a shortcoming in myself, how little patience or understanding I have for many people in the way they act. I am able to see the fragility in some, but I only have so much time to wade through their manipulations and traps and draining behaviour. Some people think I'm heartless in leaving others to suffer their own selves.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“I was trained to turn loneliness into laziness.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“Ambition: The willingness to continually question and assess one’s acceptance and contentment with their place in life; conjunct with the willingness to take action should a resolvable discrepancy between one’s values and one’s current standing, present itself.

By extension, an ambitious person is someone who has to the best of their abilities thoughtfully defined their values and continues on to do whatever is reasonably possible to fully embrace who they are in life.”
― Yann Tanguay

“All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“The best you can hope for in a relationship is to find
someone whose flaws are the sort you don’t mind. It is
futile to look for someone who has no flaws, or someone
who is capable of significant change; that sort of person
exists only in our imaginations.”
― Scott Adams, God's Debris: A Thought Experiment

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
― Scott Adams

“I love you like a fat kid loves cake!”
― Scott Adams

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time