Lorraine > Lorraine's Quotes

“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“ESTRAGON:
Do you think God sees me?
VLADIMIR:
You must close your eyes.
Estragon closes his eyes, staggers worse.
ESTRAGON:
(stopping, brandishing his fists, at the top of his voice.) God have pity on me!
VLADIMIR:
(vexed). And me?
ESTRAGON:
On me! On me! Pity! On me!”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“Her soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to choose a turning. "To know the truth--to accept without bitterness"-- those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford...”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“[T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. … [E]nvision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward — we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.”
― David Foster Wallace

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.”
― Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“You are partly crazy, and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
― Glenn Gould

“The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

“The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. NON SERVIAM!”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“As the ironist does not have the new within his power, it might be asked how he destroys the old, and to this it must be answered: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“God put me on earth to accomplish certain things. Right now, I’m so far behind, I’ll never die.”
― Bill Watterson

“the communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living"--The Little Gidding”
― T.S. Eliot

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
― T.S. Eliot

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”
― Soren Kieregaaard

“I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

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

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Hobbes: Do you think there's a God?
Calvin: Well, somebody's out to get me!”
― Bill Watterson

“A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”
― Bill Watterson