David > David's Quotes

“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn't breaking. It hurts because it's getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.”
― Rita Mae Brown, Riding Shotgun

“Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul?”
― Haruki Murakami

“Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”
― Osip Mandelstam

“I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”
― Susan Sontag

“I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.”
― Susan Sontag

“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. ”
― Susan Sontag

“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”
― Susan Sontag

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous”
― Susan Sontag

“Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“The really important thing is not to reject anything.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska