Arria > Arria's Quotes

“To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive them deeper and deeper into the darkness and light (which is their mortification and their reward), and confront them with a choice. They may either slacken and fall back, accepting the relief of a rational view and the approval of others, or they may push on, and, by falling, arise. When and if by their unforgivable stubbornness they finally burst through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no longer called afflicted or insane. They are called saints.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”
― Charles Bukowski

“People empty me. I have to get away to refill.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Hey baby, when I write, I'm the hero of my shit.”
― Charles Bukowski

“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
― Charles Bukowski

“writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It's as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.”
― Charles Bukowski, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990

“and love is a word used
too much and
much
too soon.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps

“I can
almost understand
why
people
leap
from
bridges.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
― Charles Bukowski

“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Baby," I said, "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“dogs and angels are not
very far apart”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“I want so much that is not here and do not know
where to go.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“take a writer away from his typewriter
and all you have left
is
the sickness
which started him
typing
in the
beginning”
― Charles Bukowski

“not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Give me a night by the fire, with a book in my hand, not that flickering rectangular son of a bitch that sits screaming in every living room in the land.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Not surprisingly, he began to sing, and because no one in the world could hear him, and he sang without inhibition, he sang well.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring