Iain > Iain's Quotes

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#1

“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
― P.G. Wodehouse , The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology

tags: disappointment, humor, moroseness, russia, satire, sorrow, tolstoy

484 likes

#2

“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

tags: despair, hope

2454 likes

#3

“I love you, and I want you to be happy, I want you to have the life you deserve. And if that means … if that means I have to stand here and watch you walk away, then I’ll do it. I won’t be happy about it. It’ll break my heart. But … if that’s what you really need, then we’re done.”
― Charles Sheehan-Miles, A Song for Julia

tags: letting-go, love

67 likes

#4

“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

tags: depression, despair, loss, love

362 likes

#5

“When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

626 likes

#6

“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

tags: change, forget, time

234 likes

#7

“Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

46 likes

#8

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

tags: foolish, foolish-people, ignorant, incuriosity, uninformed, uninformed-opinion

503 likes

#9

“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

tags: censorship, free-speech, humor, libel, offense, philosophical, politics, sarcasm, slander, wisdom

865 likes

#10

“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

tags: deadlines, humor, humour, work, writing

32149 likes

#11

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
― Douglas Adams

tags: attributed-no-source, humor, misattributed-douglas-adams, wit

11373 likes

#12

“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

64 likes

#13

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

tags: change, human

5407 likes

#14

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

tags: memory

3173 likes

#15

“There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.”
― Dante Alighieri

tags: memories, misery, sadness, sorrow

297 likes

#16

“I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

651 likes

#17

“The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.”
― James Matthew Barrie

tags: happiness

387 likes

#18

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister

tags: ambitions, life, plans, reality-check

171 likes

#19

“A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

tags: depression, humor, melancholy, wit

423 likes

#20

“I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare -- or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad -- who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves

tags: humor, insightful, the-unexpected

98 likes

#21

“I think of how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.”
― James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

179 likes

#22

“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

tags: business, love

1373 likes

#23

“Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.”
― Nick Cave

209 likes

#24

“There's a lot of things blamed on me that never happened. But then, there's a lot of things that I did that I never got caught at.”
― Johnny Cash

218 likes

#25

“Improvise, Adapt and Overcome!”
― Clint Eastwood, Heartbreak Ridge

63 likes

#26

“Singing in the rain. I'm singing in the rain. And it's such a fucking glorious feeling. An unexpected downpour and I am just giving myself into it. Because what the fuck else can you do? Run for cover? Shriek and curse? No--when the rain falls you just let it fall and you grin like a madman and you dance with it because if you can make yourself happy in the rain, then you're doing pretty alright in life.”
― David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

tags: happiness, life, singing-in-the-rain

357 likes

#27

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: life, regrets

18617 likes

#28

“Sometimes,' said Pooh, 'the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
― A.A. Milne

3732 likes

#29

“The spot was empty. Empty but not void. Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty-with empty, you are aware of what's supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.”
― David Levithan

tags: david-levithan, every-you-every-me

21 likes

#30

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

tags: dance, heaven, hurt, inspirational, life, love, sing

128931 likes

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