A. Gusenkov > A.'s Quotes

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

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”
― Albert Camus

“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“Meg, I give you your faults.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“I am a pomegranate ripe with moist seeds, each seed a killing I'm going to carry out at some future time. When I've no more seeds inside me, when there's nothing left but flesh, I want to meet the man who made me.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees

“I believe in the future. I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it. I believe in unfathomable quantities of nourishment.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees

“But I look like a human, and feel the way humans do. I consist of the same parts... Is it a question of name? Could I be a human if you called me one?”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees

“That’s why I’ve come to see you today, in the hope that there might be some other function in which I’d have less responsibility, without having to relate to the overall workflow to the same extent. I’d like to be assigned to that kind of position. I realize the abilities I’ve been allocated won’t be fully exploited in that case, but does the pain I feel not mean anything? I venture to suggest that such pain impacts the quality of my work and moreover may negatively influence the work of my colleagues. OK. I see. So I wouldn’t have the power of speech? No, I understand. I hereby consent. When”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

“I’m like a plant where everything’s withered away apart from a single green shoot that’s still alive, and this shoot is my body and mind, and my mind is like a hand, it touches rather than thinks.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

(Casual Chance, 1964)”
― Colette

“Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...”
― R.D. Ronald

“I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.

"Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?

No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays