Osama > Osama's Quotes

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”
― Raymond Carver

“But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

“Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”
― Philip Roth

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“You are your best thing”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. (on the wall of a bedroom at a recovery house for alcoholics and drug addicts)”
― David Foster Wallace

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor. ”
― Charles Willeford

“Nothing human surprises me.”
― Charles Willeford

“[Her life] had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.”
― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America: Stories

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence