Kelly > Kelly's Quotes

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“God always punishes us for what we can't imagine.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“Put an asshole on a plane in Boston an asshole gets off in Seattle”
― Stephen King

“How to Draw a Picture (XII)

Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.”
― Stephen King

“I am like a moon that shines on an immense, unknown sea where ships never pass”
― Auguste Rodin

“A pristine landscape was perfection itself; it was only when you added people that everything changed.”
― Armistead Maupin

“Actions have consequences. In actions have them. We set things in motion by what we don't do.”
― Armistead Maupin

“It all goes so fast, she thought. We dole out our lives in dinner parties and plane flights, and it's over before we know it. We lose everyone we love, if they don't lose us first, and every single thing we do is intended to distract us from that reality.”
― Armistead Maupin, Mary Ann in Autumn

“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
(as quoted by Tony Judt)”
― Albert Camus

“If something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody”
― Thomas Carlyle

“We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing wildly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“Mediocre times beget empty prophets”
― Albert Camus

“The people say what they like and then I do what I like”
― Frederick the Great

“Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it”
― Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

“Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn't.”
― Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

“East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth”
― Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

“And as the wind gusted against those windows, I saw how, in an instant, I lost my shelter. This truth had hardly escaped me until then, far from it, but the clarity of that moment was overwhelming. And I am still shaking.

They would indeed be aghast to see the mess I am now. This is not me, this is now who I was with them.”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
― R.D. Laing

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”
― R.D. Laing

“Be independent of the good opinion of other people.”
― Abraham Maslow

“Where words fail, music speaks.”
― Hans Christian Andersen

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The world is filled with people who are no longer needed -- and who try to make slaves of all of us -- and they have their music and we have ours.”
― Woody Guthrie

“Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.”
― Woody Guthrie

“The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.

What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?

But I am done with this creed of corruption.

I am done with the monster of "We," the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

This god, this one word:

"I.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem