Prerna Sinha > Prerna's Quotes

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“I can have oodles of charm when I want to.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“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

“Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a
life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This
was a common combination on the planet Earth.
”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr

“It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
― Norman Mailer

“No, but why is Croft that way?
Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“You will, Judas, my brother. God will give you the strength, as much as you lack, because it is necessary—it is necessary for me to be killed and for you to betray me. We two must save the world. Help me."

Judas bowed his head. After a moment he asked, "If you had to betray your master, would you do it?"

Jesus reflected for a long time. Finally he said, "No, I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to. That is why God pitied me and gave me the easier task: to be crucified.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

“My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

“We are not men, to have need of another, an eternal life; we are women, and for us one moment with man we love is everlasting Paradise, one moment far from the man we love is everlasting hell. It is here on earth that we women love out eternity”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

“Never in my life have I feared death as much as I feared that resurrection.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Human nature is the same in all professions.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
― Kurt Vonnegut