Calvin > Calvin's Quotes

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“Books are a narcotic.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“Everyone loses their way at some point, and it’s not just because of their mistakes or the decisions they make. It’s because they’re horribly, wonderfully human. And the one thing I’ve learned about being human is that we can’t do this alone. When we’re lost, we need help to try to find our way again.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“Don’t you wish you were here?”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“Home is where you feel like yourself,”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“There's nothing like being admonished by a nine-year-old ecoterrorist in training.”
― T.J. Klune, Bear, Otter, and the Kid

“Time is a river, I've learned. Always moving forward. But for people like me, people who have loved and lost, the river is something we fight. We swim against the current, trying to get back to the way we once were, trying to hold onto anything to keep us from getting swept away. It's exhausting and eventually we tire. Still we push on.”
― T.J. Klune, Into This River I Drown

“I’ll wait for you,” he said as his hand dropped to his side, as his eyes began to dim. “I think I could wait for you forever.”
― T.J. Klune, Burn

“Sometimes I think I like you,” Gus said. “And then you talk or breathe or exist and I’m not so sure.”
― T.J. Klune, How to Be a Normal Person

“Death isn’t a final ending, Wallace. It is an ending, sure, but only to prepare you for a new beginning.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a unicorn ;)”
― T.J. Klune, Tell Me It's Real

“Please let it be known that from this day forward my working title for the business is now 'Queen of the Fuck Palace!”
― T.J. Klune, The Lightning-Struck Heart

“Bear. It’s always been you. It will always be you. I love you, and that’s why it will always be enough.”
― TJ Klune, Bear, Otter, and the Kid

“I’ve always wanted to see if humans make good fertilizer. It seems like they would.” She eyed him up and down hungrily. “All that flesh.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“Pretty much I would let Gemma know
that she is a fat cunt
and, um the shoes that she gave me were
not something that I would particularly
buy for myself.

They were old maiden type of shoes, and
she said that those shoes were meant to
be worn on a beautiful woman

So if that is the case she should have put
them back on the rack and she should
never even purchased them because she
was UNQUALIFIED to own those shoes if
that's the case

and, um I think that Gemma is just a
disgrace. She's a disgrace to women who are
actually beautiful and classy and, um she
just doesn't have the vernacular she
thinks she possesses

Somebody lied to her several times and
told her that she was fly, hot and sexy
and beautiful and she's nothing like that
She's nothing of the sort”
― Tiffany Pollard

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography