Raz Morar > Raz's Quotes

“A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“You’d wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.

You said it was like lifting a cello
out of its black case.”
― Eduardo C. Corral

“...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Through pain I've learned to comfort suffering men”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.”
― Aesop, Aesop’s Fables

“I can't be friends with a man who blows hot and cold with the same breath.”
― Aesop, Aesop’s Fables

“Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.”
― Lord Byron

“I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.”
― Lord Byron

“A drop of ink may make a million think.”
― George Gordon Byron

“It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.”
― Andrei Codrescu

“Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“Do not be afraid of your difficulties.Do not wish you could be in other circumstances than you are. For when you have made the best of an adversity, it becomes the stepping stone to a splendid opportunity.”
― H.P. Blavatsky

“The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”
― Dimitri Merejkowski, Romance of Leonard da Vinci

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”
― Gaston Bachelard

“She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.”
― Henry James

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
― David Foster Wallace

“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.”
― Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions

“Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”
― Freeman John Dyson, Imagined Worlds

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas