Nathaniel Widodo > Nathaniel's Quotes

“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak and then decide not to say it after all.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor

“I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“An apple a day, if well aimed, keeps the doctor away.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Oh, I don't know, you know, don't you know?”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“It's a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don't find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories

“[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."

(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Employers are like horses — they require management.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves

“You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with 'Welcome' written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

“One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”
― Plato, Apology

“If you think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honourable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves.”
― Plato, Apology

“For Sayonara, literally translated, 'Since it must be so,' of all the good-bys I have heard is the most beautiful. Unlike the Auf Wiedershens and Au revoirs, it does not try to cheat itself by any bravado 'Till we meet again,' any sedative to postpone the pain of separation. It does not evade the issue like the sturdy blinking Farewell. Farewell is a father's good-by. It is - 'Go out in the world and do well, my son.' It is encouragement and admonition. It is hope and faith. But it passes over the significance of the moment; of parting it says nothing. It hides its emotion. It says too little. While Good-by ('God be with you') and Adios say too much. They try to bridge the distance, almost to deny it. Good-by is a prayer, a ringing cry. 'You must not go - I cannot bear to have you go! But you shall not go alone, unwatched. God will be with you. God's hand will over you' and even - underneath, hidden, but it is there, incorrigible - 'I will be with you; I will watch you - always.' It is a mother's good-by. But Sayonara says neither too much nor too little. It is a simple acceptance of fact. All understanding of life lies in its limits. All emotion, smoldering, is banked up behind it. But it says nothing. It is really the unspoken good-by, the pressure of a hand, 'Sayonara.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient

“The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt...He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin

“I'll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“It always is harder to be left behind than to be the one to go...”
― Bodie Thoene; Brock Thoene, Shiloh Autumn

“It's not that we spend five days looking forward to just two. It's that most people do what they enjoy most on those two days. Imagine living a life where everyday are your Saturdays and Sundays. Make everyday your weekend. Make everyday a play-day…”
― James A. Murphy, The Waves of Life Quotes and Daily Meditations

“There’s a trick to the 'graceful exit.' It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over — and let it go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out.”
― Ellen Goodman

“Henry was learning that time apart has a way of creating distance- more than mountains and time zone separating them. Real distance, the kind that makes you ache and stop wondering. Longing so bad that it begins to hurt to care so much.”
― Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

“No, I don't miss you... Not in a way that one is missed.
But I think of you.
Sometimes.
In the way that one might think of the summer sunshine
On a winter night...”
― Sreesha Divakaran, Those Imperfect Strokes