Big Books of 2026

Alison Shaw > Alison's Quotes

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  • #1
    T.S. Eliot
    “What is hell? Hell is oneself.
    Hell is alone, the other figures in it
    Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
    And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
    ― T.S. Eliot
    tags: hell, loneliness
    851 likes

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  • #2
    Edith Wharton
    “Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read (and, I hope, to write), a thousand little daily wonders to marvel at and rejoice in.”
    ― Edith Wharton
    5 likes

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  • #3
    W. Somerset Maugham
    “The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.”
    ― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
    tags: meaning-of-life, secret-of-life
    264 likes

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  • #4
    Cormac McCarthy
    “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
    ― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
    tags: consent, existence, horror, knowledge, western
    1070 likes

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  • #5
    Cormac McCarthy
    “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
    ― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
    759 likes

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  • #6
    Cormac McCarthy
    “Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
    ― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
    tags: atheism, mystery
    416 likes

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  • #7
    Cormac McCarthy
    “When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
    ― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
    tags: truths
    408 likes

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  • #8
    Cormac McCarthy
    “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.”
    ― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
    tags: secrets, superstition, the-judge
    76 likes

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  • #9
    Bertrand Russell
    “I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
    ― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
    tags: babylon, belief, burden-of-proof, christian-god, egyptian, fiction, gods, hypothesis, knowledge, olympus, probability, proof, rational, reason, santa, satan, superstition
    820 likes

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  • #10
    Christopher Hitchens
    “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
    ― Christopher Hitchens
    tags: atheism, reason, science, skeptic
    3324 likes

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  • #11
    Euripides
    “Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
    ― Euripides, The Bacchae
    tags: foolishness, rationality, reason, sense, stupidity, understanding
    3228 likes

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  • #12
    Edith Wharton
    “Ethan’s love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and “fellows doing things.”
    ― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
    2 likes

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  • #13
    Edith Wharton
    “The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic”
    ― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
    tags: ethan-frome, pain, reality
    26 likes

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  • #14
    Edith Wharton
    “She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.”
    ― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
    tags: classics
    18 likes

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  • #15
    Henry James
    “He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.”
    ― Henry James, The American
    tags: aristocracy, democracy
    9 likes

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  • #16
    Henry James
    “It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. ”
    ― Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle
    13 likes

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  • #17
    Henry James
    “People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.”
    ― Henry James, The American
    3 likes

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  • #18
    Chinua Achebe
    “Have you not heard that when two brothers fight a stranger reaps the harvest?”
    ― Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
    8 likes

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  • #19
    Chinua Achebe
    “Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.”
    ― Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
    6 likes

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  • #20
    Chinua Achebe
    “The inquisitive monkey gets a bullet in the face.”
    ― Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
    1 likes

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  • #21
    Chinua Achebe
    “A man who asks questions does not lose his way; that is what our fathers taught us.”
    ― Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
    6 likes

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  • #22
    Chinua Achebe
    “There is no story that is not true.”
    ― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
    tags: phylosophy
    173 likes

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  • #23
    Chinua Achebe
    “If you don't like my story,write your own”
    ― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
    161 likes

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  • #24
    Chinua Achebe
    “When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk”
    ― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
    tags: inspirational-life
    139 likes

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  • #25
    Chinua Achebe
    “Women and music should not be dated.”
    ― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
    21 likes

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  • #26
    Chinua Achebe
    “When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.”
    ― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
    22 likes

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  • #27
    Chinua Achebe
    “A person who has not secured a place on the floor should not begin to look for a mat.”
    ― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
    3 likes

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  • #28
    Dorothy B. Hughes
    “It’s harder to come back than it is to arrive.”
    ― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place
    19 likes

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  • #29
    Dorothy B. Hughes
    “He finished his drink. 'I don’t like mornings either,' he said. “That’s why I’m a writer.”
    ― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place
    tags: drinking, writers
    12 likes

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  • #30
    Dorothy B. Hughes
    “At eight the bar was emptied of all but those whose goal was alcoholism”
    ― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place
    2 likes



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Tags From Alison’s Quotes

hell
loneliness
meaning-of-life
secret-of-life
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existence
horror
knowledge
western
atheism
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satan
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pain
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classics
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phylosophy
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drinking
writers