Anthony G > Anthony's Quotes

“A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.”
― Dawn Powell

“We are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know.”
― W.H. Auden

“The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Essays

“Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.”
― W.H. Auden

“I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.”
― W.H. Auden

“Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“That’s why I ca never be happy with simple, good people”, she thought. “It isn’t enough to be honest and good-to be happy they must pretend. They really must!”
― Dawn Powell, Come Back to Sorrento

“Modesty's no credit to anyone-it's just a social grace.”
― Dawn Powell, Come Back to Sorrento

“I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.”
― Dawn Powell

“A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.”
― Dawn Powell

“No one but a person who has been guilty himself could read guilt in others so well.”
― Dawn Powell, Dance Night

“Love, dear friends, begins with curiosity.”
― Dawn Powell, Whither

“How serious is it to cut out that little section behind the brow that separates what a Nice Girl Sees and Hears from What Really Happens.”
― Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast

“Friendship in youth represents sympathy without understanding; in age, understanding without sympathy.”
― Dawn Powell, The Diaries, 1931-1965

“Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.”
― Dawn Powell

“That’s why I can never be happy with simple, good people”, she thought. “It isn’t enough to be honest and good-to be happy they must pretend. They really must!”
― Dawn Powell, Come Back to Sorrento

“We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“too—my god, what kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world’s population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pinheaded elites—is proof enough that we don’t deserve a future. I”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

“Everyone’s last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity and purity of a love story, any love, base love or heroic love or transgressive love or love that is a blind and lame and ridiculous lie—anything the opposite of alone and lonely and sexless, and the absence of someone to care about or talk to.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan