Ineffable > Ineffable's Quotes

“Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.”
― Stephen Fry, The Library Book

“Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.”
― Stephen Fry

“Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“Jeannot la bêtise des amoureux est immense, végétale, animale, astrale. Que faire? Comment te faire comprendre que je n'existe plus en dehors de toi.”
― Jean Cocteau, Lettres à Jean Marais

“But you see Annie, where there's pain, there's still feeling and where there's feeling, there's hope.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“Si pourtant je te disais, papa, que j'ai essayé de me tuer.”
― Jules Renard, Poil de Carotte

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“There can't be a quarrel without two parties, and I won't be one. I will be a friend to you in spite of you. So now you know what you've got to expect”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“Judge us not equally, Abraham. We may all deserve hell, but some of us deserve it sooner than others”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

“There are but two types of men who desire war: those who haven’t the slightest intention of fighting it themselves, and those who haven’t the slightest idea what it is. … Any man who has seen the face of death knows better than to seek him out a second time.”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

“Without death,' he answered, 'life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”
― anthony burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words—strike that, I love words—and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree - can’t we? - that no matter how confident we may appear to others, inside we are all sobbing, scared and uncertain for much of the time. Or perhaps it’s just me.

Oh God, perhaps it really is just me.

Actually it doesn’t really matter, when you come to think of it. If it is just me, then you are reading the story of some weird freak. You are free to treat this book like science fiction, fantasy or exotic travel literature. Are there really men like Stephen Fry on this planet? Goodness, how alien some people are. And if I am not alone, then neither are you, and hand in hand we can marvel together at the strangeness of the human condition.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“Between funny and witty
Falls the shadow”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“If I had been psychopathic enough to feel no remorse or religious enough to believe in redemption through a divine outside agency, perhaps I should have been happier; as it was I had neither the consolation that I was free of guilt, nor the conviction that I could ever be forgiven.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“Counterintuitively, self-hatred is one of the leading symptoms of clinical narcissism. Only by telling yourself and the world how much you hate yourself can you receive the reliable shower of praise and admiration in response that you feel you deserve … ”
― Stephen Fry, More Fool Me

“I've spent years living safely to secure a longer life, and look where that's gotten me. I'm at the finish line but I never ran the race.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

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

“Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.”
― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone