Michael > Michael's Quotes

“This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Transient guests are we.”
― Hideyuki Kikuchi

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Travels With Myself and Another

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
― Mark Twain

“I didn't dare think of the future; the past was still happening.”
― John Grisham, The Street Lawyer

“Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.”
― Franz Kafka

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Have I have played my part well in the comedy of life? If so, clap your hands and dismiss me from the stage with applause.”
― Augustus

“Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.”
― Confucius, The Analects

“Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king […] White to be bold. White to not blend into the night. White to give warning. For if you were going to assassinate a man, he was entitled to see you coming.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Life before Death.
Strength before Weakness.
Journey before Destination.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Honor is dead. But I'll see what I can do.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“It's easy to believe in something when you win all the time...The losses are what define a man's faith.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Sometimes the prize is not worth the costs. The means by which we achieve victory are as important as the victory itself.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“The most important step a man can take. It's not the first one, is it?
It's the next one. Always the next step, Dalinar.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“To lack feeling is to be dead, but to act on every feeling is to be a child.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be. But for now, we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“Somebody has to start. Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Accept the pain, but don't accept that you deserved it.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer