Mel > Mel's Quotes

“Pop, I'm nothing! I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all.”
― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

“This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me”
― Emily Dickinson

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Pardon My Sanity In A World Insane”
― Emily Dickinson

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“All good things are wild and free.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Things do not change; we change.”
― henry david thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“When you stop growing you start dying.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Love is a haunting melody that I have never mastered, and I fear I never will.”
― William S. Burroughs

“There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.”
― William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“And never have I felt so deeply
at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.”
― Albert Camus

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
― George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm