london > london 's Quotes

“I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her.
"Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me.
"The big show is inside my head," I said.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“I had been there before; I knew all about it.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“The trees like lungs filling with air
My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“I disliked having a fork pointed at me and I disliked the sound of the voice never stopping; I wished he would put food on the fork and put it into his mouth and strangle himself.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Dispute not with her: she is lunatic.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III

“Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.
–The Grand Inquisitor”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“If he's honest, he'll steal; if he's human, he'll murder; if he's faithful, he'll deceive.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions

“But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“How Robin would have loved this!’ the aunts used to say fondly. 'How Robin would have laughed!’ In truth, Robin had been a giddy, fickle child - somber at odd moments, practically hysterical at others - and in life, this unpredictability had been a great part of his charm. But his younger sisters, who had never in any proper sense known him at all, nonetheless grew up certain of their dead brother’s favorite color (red); his favorite book (The Wind in the Willows) and his favorite character in it (Mr. Today); his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate) and his favorite baseball team (the Cardinals) and a thousand other things which they - being living children, and preferring chocolate ice cream one week and peach the next - were not even sure they knew about themselves. Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“To die, - To sleep, - To sleep!
Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet