Ariya > Ariya's Quotes

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.”
― T.H. White

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a
coffee cup in a park for old men playing
chess or silly games of some sort.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann

“Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there…a clock without a craftsman.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity”
― David Foster Wallace

“Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don't know it and feel safe.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“O, why should nature build so foul a den, Unless the gods delight in tragedies?”
― William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus

“If a student works rigorously, no topic is truly foolish, and the student can draw useful conclusions even from a remote or peripheral topic.”
― Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis

“...learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy..”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.
-Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
― William Shakespeare , Julius Caesar

“Life's little ironies are not always manifest. We hear distant rumbling sounds of its tragedies, but rarely are we permitted to witness the reality.
(from W.L.S.)”
― Theodore Dreiser, Twelve Men