Andra > Andra 's Quotes

“But—let me tell you my cat joke. It's very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she's got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting to be cooked while she chats with the guests in the living room—has a few drinks and whatnot. But then she excuses herself to go into the kitchen to cook the steak—and it's gone. And there's the family cat, in the corner, sedately washing it's face."

"The cat got the steak," Barney said.

"Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. "Weigh the cat," someone says. They've had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and a guest says, "okay, that's it. There's the steak." They're satisfied that they know what happened, now; they've got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, "But where's the cat?”
― Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness.”
― Julian Barnes, Metroland

“Together they stroke the silence.”
― John O'Brien, Leaving Las Vegas

“That which begins will also end.”
― John O'Brien, Leaving Las Vegas

“Fiecare om are un motiv personal ca să moară.”
― Aglaja Veteranyi, Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Blocat între studentul care nu mai eram de mult şi adultul care nu mai deveneam odată, nu ajungeam să fiu iubit pentru motivele corecte sau măcar statornice, căutam dragostea în toate locurile strâmte şi dezafectate, îmi risipeam intimitatea pe extaz, mă ofeream tot mai uşor pentru a mă deschide tot mai greu, confundam predispoziţia mea la renunţare cu epuizarea.”
― Marius Chivu, Sfîrșit de sezon

“You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“But it's Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
― Timothy Leary

“Think for yourself. Question authority.”
― Timothy Leary

“What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I had no interests. I had no interests in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn't let me.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“Everything in life is just for a while.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

“If one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is a consolation – indeed, a deep satisfaction – to be gained from this observation when looking back over one’s life.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

“It's the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“You learn to get by from day to day," Sam Regan said sympathetically to him. "You never think in longer terms. Just until dinner or until time for bed; very finite intervals and tasks and pleasures. Escapes.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

“Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“Separation is painful, but so is its opposite. And if being together brings joy, then it is only proper that separation should do the same in its own way.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two