☁Aleks☁ > ☁Aleks☁'s Quotes

“It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in "The King in Yellow," all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect.”
― Robert W. Chambers, The Yellow Sign and Other Stories

“Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.”
― Robert Chambers

“Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die though, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa ”
― Robert W. Chambers

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
― Anais Nin

“But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid

“Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan

“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."

[I saw hate in a graveyard -- Stephen Fry, The Guardian, 5 June 2005]”
― Stephen Fry

“there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.”
― Jonah Lehrer

“We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don't know what we're talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works

“...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.”
― Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

“Each person has a literature inside them.”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
― H.L. Mencken

“The earth laughs in flowers.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Beware the fury of a patient man”
― Tom Clancy

“Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.”
― Tom Clancy, Red Rabbit

“You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf... You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired – it’s hard work.”
― Tom Clancy

“Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”
― Mark Twain

“If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“What is that unforgettable line?”
― Samuel Beckett

“We're the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago!”
― Taylor Mali

“Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?”
― John Leonard

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems