Mirza > Mirza's Quotes

“We buy balloons, we let them go.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“This is not an exit.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The sister played so beautifully. Her face was tilted to one side and she followed the notes with soulful and probing eyes. Gregor advanced a little, keeping his eyes low so that they might possibly meet hers. Was he a beast if music could move him so?”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“Like a Dog!”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“At the same time, however, the collective behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101 has deeply disturbing implications. There are many societies afflicted by traditions of racism and caught in the siege mentality of war or threat of war. Everywhere society conditions people to respect and defer to authority, and indeed could scarcely function otherwise. Everywhere people seek career advancement. In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?”
― Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

“As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Doesn’t look like a monster, does he?” “They rarely do.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider

“This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun

“One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“To sit in this awful mess and maybe smoke some dope and watch some innocuous shit on a dumb glass tube and feel fine about it and know there's really nothing you have to do, ever, but feel your warm friend's silent content. You don't feel guilty about not fighting a war or carrying signs to protest it either. We've just mastered the life of doing nothing, which when you think about it, may be the hardest thing of all to do.”
― Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.”
― joseph heller, Catch-22

“This is a covert operation, people!” he shouted over his bullhorn. “Covert!”
― John Swartzwelder, The Time Machine Did It

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“The old man said, ‘You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but sharing of enemies.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Don't be afraid, he said. I'll speak softly. It's not for the world's ears but for yours only. Let me see you. Don't you know that I'd have loved you
like a son?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Call me Ishmael.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Carry the fire.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road