Swstein > Swstein's Quotes

“The last time we were here,” I said, “I told you I liked you. I should have trusted myself to say I love you.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“There’s science and there’s science, is all I’m saying. When humans are the subjects, it’s mostly not science.)”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“All this happened, more or less.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“When everything was beautiful and nothing hurt...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“You know how advice is - you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyways.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent. ”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Here is a lesson in creative writing.

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding.

For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding.

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“I never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Why am I always looking at life through a window?”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts the most.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“And now - Plato's words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames: '...the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves