Quotes - Richard R (The United Kingdom) Showing 1-30 of 107

#1

“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
― Dorothy Parker

tags: epitaph, humor, the-new-yorker

852 likes

#2

“It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.”
― Jean Cocteau

69 likes

#3

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

177891 likes

#4

“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”
― William Burroughs

331 likes

#5

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

tags: literature, reading, solitude

4231 likes

#6

“Sooner or later, everything turns into television.”
― J.G. Ballard

66 likes

#7

“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Personal Notebooks Of Thomas Hardy

1347 likes

#8

“After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

tags: accidents, cars, crash

99 likes

#9

“Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.”
― Dorothy Parker

tags: dorothy-parker, heterosexuality, homosexuality, humor, wit

1629 likes

#10

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

26 likes

#11

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
― J.G. Ballard

382 likes

#12

“If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
(as quoted by Tony Judt)”
― Albert Camus

tags: camus, ethics, philosophy, tony-judt

171 likes

#13

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

tags: attributed-no-source

7148 likes

#14

“Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

tags: life, literature

56 likes

#15

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
― Oscar Wilde

tags: creation, god, humor, man

6388 likes

#16

“We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

47 likes

#17

“Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

99 likes

#18

“George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

tags: crazy, life, strength

80 likes

#19

“Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.”
― Christopher Isherwood

38 likes

#20

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

tags: funny, humor, inspirational

643 likes

#21

“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

tags: death, sadness, sickness

193 likes

#22

“If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we’d live in a dull world.”
― Tom McCarthy, Satin Island

tags: people, world

10 likes

#23

“Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Platform

tags: life, nothing

430 likes

#24

“If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.”
― Michel Houellebecq

tags: life

128 likes

#25

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

tags: life, novels, realism, reality, writers, writing

102 likes

#26

“I'm looking for a path out of the emptiness but all I see is the great wide earth in various formations.”
― David Wojnarowicz, 7 Miles a Second

7 likes

#27

“Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

281 likes

#28

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

3206 likes

#29

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

922 likes

#30

“When all else fails, philosophize.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

305 likes

Richard R > Richard's Quotes

Tags From Richard’s Quotes