Brandon Alan > Brandon's Quotes

“And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“At some point my need for a solution was replaced by the poetry of my continuous failure.”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”
― Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

“Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“She lived just three blocks away, in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she’d come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day’s complaints.”
― Don DeLillo

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”
― E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Having oscillated all his life between the torments of a superficial loitering and the horrors of disinterested endeavour, he finds himself at last in a situation where to do nothing exclusively would be an act of the highest value, and significance.”
― Samuel Beckett, Watt

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows.”
― Lucian Blaga

“Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Have you paused to consider that there is no way out? Each way out of one situation necessarily being the way into another situation.”
― Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child

“Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.”
― Alberto Moravia

“People seem unable to admit this principle of chance. Our spirits are not strong enough to stand the idea of life being a mere succession of chances—the idea, that is, of infinity. Each of us in his individual existence, which is contained between the chance of his birth and the chance of his death, identifies those few incidents that have arisen through what he styles his “will”; and the thing that emerges consistently from this he calls his “character” or again his “life.” Thus we contrive to comfort ourselves; there is, in fact, no other way for us to think.”
― Shohei Ooka, Fires on the Plain

“To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.”
― Henry Miller

“There is in every madman
a misunderstood genius
whose idea
shining in his head
frightened people
and for whom delirium was the only solution
to the strangulation
that life had prepared for him.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“I'll go this minute!' Of course, I remained.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean's uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother's naughtiness.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“People feel sorry for you if you sit down on a bench in the evening.”
― Emmanuel Bove

“a man like me, who does not work, who does not want to work, will always be disliked.
In that house full of working people , I was the madman that, deep down, everyone wanted to be. I was the one who went without food, the cinema, warm clothes, to be free. I was the one who, without meaning to, daily reminded people of their wretched state.
people have not forgiven me for being free and for not being afraid of poverty.”
― Emmanuel Bove

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung

“No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.”
― Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea

“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections