Giannis Fiorentinos > Giannis's Quotes

“December 25, 1963
Christmas night and they’ve battered their heads together until they are silly and they’ve smiled themselves silly and vomited on the floor, 98% of them amateur drinkers, amateur Christians, amateur human beings”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

“Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Lately in that loneliness in which he found himself, laying with his face to the back of the sofa, that loneliness in the middle of a bustling town, among his many friends and his family—that loneliness more profound than could be found anywhere, any spot on the seafloor, or any stretch of land—in these late days of horrific loneliness Ivan Ilych lived only by his memories of the past. One after another he imagined scenes from his life. He would always begin with the most recent and proceed to the earliest, to his childhood, and settle there.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.”
― Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories

“HAMM:
In my house.
(pause.)
One day you’ll be blind, like me. You’ll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me.
(pause.)
One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down. Then you’ll say, I’m hungry, I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up. You’ll say, I shouldn’t have sat down, but since I have I’ll sit on a little longer, then I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up and you won’t get anything to eat.
(pause.)
You’ll look at the wall a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I’ll feel better, and you’ll close them. And when you open them again there’ll be no wall any more.
(pause.)
Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.
(pause.)
Yes, one day you’ll know what it is, you’ll be like me, except that you won’t have anyone with you, because you won’t have had pity on anyone and because there won’t be anyone left to have pity on.
(pause.)”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays I didn't wind my spring.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the differences of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back....”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios … We were all in it together.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“April was too lonely a month to spend alone. In April, everyone around me looked happy. People would throw their coats off and enjoy each other’s company in the sunshine—talking, playing catch, holding hands. But I was always by myself”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios . . . We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away.”
― Charles Bukowski

“No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess? ... It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The most terrible loneliness is not the kind that comes from being alone, but the kind that comes from being misunderstood. It is the loneliness of standing in a crowded room, surrounded by people who do not see you, who do not hear you, who do not know the true essence of who you are. And in that loneliness, you feel as though you are fading, disappearing into the background, until you are nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of your former self.”
― George Orwell