Gaston > Gaston's Quotes

“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.”
― G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

“But what are you? Buddhist? Japanese? Communist? What?’ ‘I’m nothing.’ ‘Can you be nothing?’ I never knew how to answer that question when I was asked it as a child, because the wording troubled me. Can you be nothing? I will be nothing.”
― Jaume Cabré, Confessions

“Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run. The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The thing is, I don't want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don't want my happiness to be othered. They're both mine. I made them, dammit.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“-Πώς πήγε το σχολείο;
-Πολύ καλά. Έμαθα να μιλώ, να απαντώ, και να σκέπτομαι με συλλαβές.
-Τότε γιατί κλαις;
-Είναι οι συλλαβές. Πονάω, όταν κόβω τις λέξεις στη μέση.
-Θα συνηθίσεις, μου λέει η Φανή. Θα συνηθίσεις.

ΤΕΛΟΣ”
― Μαργαρίτα Καραπάνου, Kassandra and the Wolf

“We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.
Then he stars weeping.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness - until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say: "What are hands?”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“If you need something to worship, then worship life - all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah