ak > ak's Quotes

“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

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“One should never mistake pattern for meaning.”
― Iain Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

“I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.”
― David Lynch

“I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force--a wild pain and decay--also accompanies everything.”
― David Lynch

“There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery”
― David Lynch

“I tell you, Mr. Okada, a cold beer at the end of the day is the best thing life has to offer. Some choosy people say that a too cold beer doesn’t taste good, but I couldn’t disagree more. The first beer should be so cold you can’t even taste it. The second one should be a little less chilled, but I want that first one to be like ice. I want it to be so cold my temples throb with pain. This is my own personal preference of course.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“As I see it, you are living with something that you keep hidden deep inside. Something heavy. I felt it from the first time I met you. You have a strong gaze, as if you have made up your mind about something. To tell you the truth, I myself carry such things around inside. Heavy things. That is how I can see it in you.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

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

“I am grateful to blessed Nature, because she made what is necessary easy to acquire and what is hard to acquire unnecessary.”
― Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia

“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
― Edith Wharton, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

“This is why it hurts the way it hurts.

You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache.

You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much.”
― pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”
― Isadora Duncan, Isadora Speaks: Uncollected Writings and Speeches of Isadora Duncan

“It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.”
― Isadora Duncan

“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it”
― Isadora Duncan

“Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure, a totally white thought. It is always in my heart; it blooms at each of my steps... The Dance is love, it is only love, it alone, and that is enough... I, then, it is amorously that I dance: to poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to anything but the rhythm of my soul.”
― Isadora Duncan

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog