Nella > Nella's Quotes

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

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“And all I loved, I loved alone.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.”
― Stanisław Lem, Hospital of the Transfiguration

“What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?'

'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?”
― Stanisław Lem

“For moral reasons ... the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally.”
― Stanisław Lem

“...all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

“When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“There are no answers, only choices.”
― Stanislav Lem, Solaris

“What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good? Only good, mind you. The rest had to be shoved somewhere out of sight, under the rug. Which History indeed did, at times politely, at times police-ly, and yet something was always sticking out, breaking loose, overthrowing.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

“A dream will always triumph over reality , once it is given a chance..”
― Stanisław Lem

“These views were voiced by the school of 'optessimists', i.e. philosophers who derived optimism for the future from a pessimistic appraisal of the present." The 21st Voyage, The Star Diaries”
― Stanisław Lem

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea