Scott > Scott's Quotes

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
― Samuel Johnson

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The love story of his life exemplified not “It must be so”, but rather “It could just as well be otherwise”.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“In marriage, insult arises again and again; and pain has to be not only endured, but consented to; and the amount of forgiveness that it necessitates is incredible and exhausting.”
― Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk

“Whatever has been kept secret, damped in ashes, smothered and contemptible, begins to come out and for the average man there is no harm in it.”
― Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk

“For alcohol is a God, as the Greeks decided when it was first introduced from the East, although a God of vengeance.”
― Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk

“Perhaps those two things, imaginary death and hopeless desire, always lie close together in one’s mind, foolishly interchangeable.”
― Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk

“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty,”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“It’s hard to envision any quantity of joy or satisfaction that would have changed my father’s fate; conversely, it’s hard to imagine any low that would have struck him as rock bottom.”
― Katharine Smyth, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

“This body you see eats, grows, walks, talks and smiles, but there is nothing left inside it but ashes.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“I used to admire believers," Tomas continued, "I thought they had an odd transcendental way of perceiving things which was closed to me. Like clairvoyants, you might say. But my son's experience proves that faith is actually quite a simple matter. He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“It was twilight in the garden, the time between day and evening. There was a pale moon in the sky, a forgotten lamp in the room of the dead.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reign in the cemetery.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being