Lander > Lander's Quotes

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”
― Earnest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's the Old Man and the Sea

“Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak. Probably so we can think twice.”
― Bill Watterson

“Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with atowering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.”
― Camus Albert, The Plague

“For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Although “The Myth of Sisyphus” poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“El secreto de una buena vejez no es mas que un pacto honrado con la soledad.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cien Anos De Soledad/ One hundred Years of Solitude: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Compendios Vosgos

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It
always made me want to do just the opposite.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Je ne suis rien que le regard qui te voit, que cette pensée incolore qui te pense.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Immanuel Kant"
"Noch wal”
― Hugo Claus, Het verdriet van België

“Ici même, je sais que jamais je ne m'approcherai assez du monde. Il me faut être nu
et puis plonger dans la mer, encore tout parfumé des essences de la terre, laver celles-ci dans celle-là, et nouer sur ma peau l'étreinte
pour laquelle soupirent lèvres à lèvres depuis si longtemps la terre et la mer. Entré dans l'eau, c'est le saisissement, la montée d'une glu
froide et opaque, puis le plongeon dans le bourdonnement des oreilles, le nez coulant et la bouche amère - la nage, les bras vernis
d'eau sortis de la mer pour se dorer dans le soleil et rabattus dans une torsion de tous les muscles; la course de l'eau sur mon corps,
cette possession tumultueuse de l'onde par mes jambes - et l'absence d'horizon. Sur le rivage, c'est la chute dans le sable, abandonné au
monde, rentré dans ma pesanteur de chair et d'os, abruti de soleil, avec, de loin en loin, un regard pour mes bras où les flaques de peau
sèche découvrent, avec le glissement de l'eau, le duvet blond et la poussière de sel.”
― Albert Camus, Noces suivi de L'été

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ”
― Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.