gms.26 > gms.26's Quotes

“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“But you are a great sinner, that's true," he added almost solemnly, and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar -- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I have so much to say to you that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I like revisiting, at certain times, spots where I was once happy; I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“You’re going to die becoming what you need to be. But when that happens you won’t need who you are right now.”
― B.R. Yeager, Negative Space

“I do not wish you much happiness--it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people's philosophy, I will simply repeat: 'Live more' and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“I never really knew whether my parents loved me or not. I guess I knew later. But those first seventeen years only ever felt like tolerance. They knew I was their fault, and because their god ordered them to love me, they held back their knives. But I knew the stories of fathers who cut their children to pieces, so most often I tried to make them feel like I wasn’t there at all. Most often failing completely.”
― B.R. Yeager, Negative Space

“There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“if you’re raised with an angry man in your house,
there will always be an angry man in your house.
you will find him even when he is not there.
and if one day you find that there is
no angry man in your house—
well, you will go find one and invite him in!”
― Catherine Lacey, Cut

“You can’t do this for me,” he said. “I won’t let you.”
“It’s not for you. It’s not a favor. It’s the cruelest thing I could do.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“People will seek to use you or destroy you. If you want to live, you must pick a side. So do not shirk from war, child. Do not flinch from suffering. When you hear screaming, run toward it.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“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

“As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Last year nothing happened
The year before nothing happened
And the year before that nothing
happened.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine percent is just living in waiting. I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“No one is perfect. Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you. And then in other people’s lives you do the same thing, you’re the person who lets everyone down, who fails to make anything better, and you hate yourself so much you wish you were dead.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Because a living person has their own reality, he says. The person who's gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they're gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don't think about him, literally, I'm ending his existence.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Does it make sense to think this way, in terms of moving forces? Like the feeling Ivan had for his father has nowhere to go anymore, like it's lodged inside him, unexpressed. In the weeks since his father died Ivan has not heard these words from anyone, l love you, or said them to anyone either. Does this explain his intense longing to hear and say them again, to relieve the pressure of this confined force inside his body? Even to think of Margaret with love gives a little relief, to allow the feeling of love into his thoughts, like a flower opening outwards inside his mind.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.”
― Emily Wilson, The Iliad

“His lies were like the truth,
and as she listened, she began to weep. / Her face was melting, like the snow that Zephyr / scatters across the mountain peaks; then Eurus / thaws it, and as it melts, the rivers swell / and flow again. So were her lovely cheeks / dissolved with tears. She wept for her own husband, / who was right next to her.”
― Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

“He wanted to care, he wanted to care so badly, but there was this gap between what he felt and what he wanted to feel, a space where something important had been carved out.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“Rin was so tired of having to prove her humanity.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“Because you don't think I'm a bad person," he said. "And I don't want to prove you wrong.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious