Kate Tedman > Kate's Quotes

“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”
― Victor Borge

“When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?”
― Quentin Crisp, The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp

“Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The big print giveth and the small print taketh away. ”
― Tom Waits

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.”
― A.A. Milne

“We can accept the unpleasant more readily than we can the inconsequential.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“And my parents finally realize I'm kidnapped and they snap into action immediately: They rent out my room.”
― Woody Allen

“Little things comfort us because little things distress us.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings

“There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.”
― Paul Valery

“So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“An empty bus hurtles through the starry night
Perhaps the driver is singing
and happy because he sings.”
― Gunter Grass

“The stars are filming us for no one.”
― Carol Ann Duffy

“What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.”
― Albert Camus

“She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.”
― Paul Valéry

“To comfort me is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.”
― Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

“Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.”
― Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

“We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.”
― Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“A bird in The Strand is worth two in Shepherds Bush”
― Spike Milligan

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.”
― Henry Miller

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac