Mel > Mel's Quotes

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work. ”
― James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

“I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity. When you don't think you can, hold on.”
― James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

“If you care about what others think of you, then you will always be their slave.”
― James Frey

“Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.”
― James Frey, My Friend Leonard

“Let things be, let yourself be, let everything be and accept it as it is. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
― James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

“About life:
"It is not complicated unless I make it so. It is not difficult unless I allow it to be. A second is no more than a second, a minute no more than a minute, a day no more than a day. They pass. All things and all time will pass. Don't force or fear, don't control or lose control. Don't fight and don't stop fighting. Embrace and endure. If you embrace, you will endure.”
― James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

“Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song? ”
― James Frey

“Be bold. But not bold, be fucking bold.”
― James Frey, My Friend Leonard

“The promise of eternal life makes people forsake the life they're given.”
― James Frey, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.”
― John Green

“What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
― William Ernest Henley, Echoes of Life and Death

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods