Zow Ormazabal > Zow's Quotes

“Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
― Confucious

“El consumo voraz de imágenes hace imposible cerrar los ojos. El punctum presupone una ascesis del ver. Le es inherente algo musical. Esta música solo suena al cerrar los ojos, cuando uno hace «un esfuerzo de silencio». El silencio libera a la imagen del «habitual blablá» de la comunicación. Cerrar los ojos significa «hacer hablar la imagen en el silencio». Así es como Barthes cita a Kafka: «Fotografiamos cosas para ahuyentarlas del espíritu. Mis historias son una forma de cerrar los ojos.»”
― Byung-Chul Han, La salvación de lo bello

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

“in all countries fools outnumber the rest;”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ”
― Marcel Proust

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.”
― Marcel Proust

“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
― Marcel Proust

“People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.”
― Marcel Proust

“A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”
― Peter Jackson, The Art of The Return of the King

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“[...] almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“For someone who writes as slowly as I do, each installment is a full day's work. Newspaper novels are painful... Whether I like what I'm writing or not, whether I'm feeling inspired or not, I have to write an installment every day.”
― Junichirô Tanizaki, Naomi

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life