Bart Van Loon > Bart's Quotes

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again.

”
― Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Two Other Plays

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Things every person should have:

•A nemesis.
•An evil twin.
•A secret headquarters.
•An escape hatch.
•A partner in crime.
•A secret identity.”
― Wil Wheaton

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“He whom one awaits is, because he is expected, already present, already master.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“Whatever he wanted of her she wanted too, solely because he was asking it of her.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anais Nin

“Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.”
― Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery