Glimmer > Glimmer's Quotes

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“Volume II, Chapter 4
"How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call "life,"—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us. Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,—shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave "life," that we may live.”
― Mary Shelley, The Last Man

“I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.”
― Mary Shelly, The Last Man

“Believe me, if you beheld on lips with grief one smile of joy and gratitude, and knew that you were parent of that smile and that without you it had never been, you would feel so pure and warm a happiness that you'd wish to live forever again and again to enjoy the same pleasure.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mathilda

“...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative...”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren’t here, and just now — like a knife-slit — they are here, still dripping sweet blood.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asyluum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday! . . .”
― H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly

“I've never really planned my life or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It's so with everyone.”
― H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly

“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“For let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures. The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. Is that right? Aye.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

“I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being.”
― Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

“How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?' Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn't know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.”
― Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

“You can Cheat a Dragon's Curse.
You do not have to accept the hand that Fate has dealt you.”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse

“Sometimes it is only a True Friend who knows what we mean when we try to speak. Somebody who has spent a lot of time with us, and listens carefully to what we are trying to say, and tries to understand.”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse

“انطلاقا من الآن، لنأذهب إلا لمشاهدة أفلام الحب، مثلما يقول الأشخاص الكبار، أفلام يُقبّل فيها الناس بعضهم، وفيها كل النّاس يحبّون بعضهم البعض. أنا الذي لم أكن أصلح إلا للضرب، سأشاهد عل الأقّل الآخرين يحبّون بعضهم بعضاً.”
― José Mauro de Vasconcelos

“- Religious imagery is partly aesthetic,' said Monty. 'It's worked on. But it's complice in the same sort of way.'
- You mean?
- It's all to do with the hygiene of the ego. A successful religion is a recipe for an innocent-feeling fantasy life and happy sex.
- Even if one's a hermit or an ascetic on a pillar?
- Especially if one's a hermit or an ascetic on a pillar.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Loving confers no rights”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Intense mutual erotic love that involves with the flesh all the refined sexual beings of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world. This love presents itself as such a dizzily lofty value that even to speak of 'enjoying' it seems a sacrilege. It is something to be undergone upon one's knees. And where it exists it cannot but shed a blazing light of justification upon its own scene, a light which can leave the rest of the world dark indeed.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Good women tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read. ”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Azazello begged her not to worry, assuring her that he had seen not only naked women but also women with their skin flayed clean off”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other… ”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Why try to pursue what is completed?”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Margarita scanned the crowd coming up the stairs and found the woman Korovyov was pointing to. She was a young woman of about twenty, with an unusually stunning figure, but with agitated and insistent eyes.
"What handkerchief?" asked Margarita.
"She has a chambermaid assigned to her," explained Korovyov, "and every night for thirty years the maid has laid out a handkerchief for her on her night table. The minute she wakes up she sees it there. She's tried burning it in the stove and drowning it in the river, but nothing helps.
"What kind of handkerchief?" whispered Margarita, raising and lowering her hand.
"A handkerchief with a dark-blue border. The fact is that when she was a waitress in a cafe, her boss lured her into the storeroom one day, and nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy, carried him into the woods, stuffed the handkerchief in his mouth, and then buried him in the ground. At her trial she said she had nothing to feed the child."
"And where's the owner of the cafe?" asked Margarita.
"Your Majesty," squeaked the cat suddenly from below." Allow me to ask you: what does the owner have to do with this? he wasn't the one who smothered the baby in the woods!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita / A Young Doctor's Notebook / The White Guard / A Dog's Heart

“اجتمعت فيك الثلاث: ثائر و عاشق و شاعر”
― Yehya al sinwar

“اجتمعت فيك الثلاث: ثائر و عاشق و شاعر”
― Yahya Al-Sinwar, الشوك والقرنفل