Fox Walker > Fox's Quotes

“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“What can I say to her? Do I know any reasons for living? I don't feel the same despair as she does, because I never expected very much. I am rather... astonished at this life which is given to me — given for nothing.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Odi et amo; quare fortasse requiris, nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

(my translation: I hate and I love, you ask why I do this, I do not know, but I feel and I am tormented)”
― Catullus, The Complete Poems

“You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Someone heard Stevenson’s impressive speech and said, “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you.” Stevenson replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do—I need a majority.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson II

“As Bokonon says: 'peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver. It reduces and at times erases the anxiety of individual consciousness. We abandon individual responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise, however morally dubious.”
― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war's appeal.”
― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

“There can't be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, War's Unwomanly Face

“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. ”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are whatever their affection for each other, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence the loneliness of life.”
― Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Nausea

“in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Now are the woods all black,
But still the sky is blue.”
― Marcel Proust , Swann’s Way

“The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way