Bz > Bz's Quotes

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

“There is no greater sorrow then to recall our times of joy in wretchedness.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

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

“He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“What is it then? Why do you hesitate?
Why do you relish living like a coward?
Why cannot you be bold and keen to start?”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy by Dante

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”
― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”
― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

“Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. ”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I've come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end...”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?" he asked.

He waited a few minutes, but the three of us didn't say anything. He continued: "Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am.”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao