Amy McHale > Amy's Quotes

“Thir must be less tae life than this”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“As with most people who are well raised, well educated, and financially secure, Dr. Tokai only thought of himself.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women: Stories

“Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words make them smaller. When they were in your head, they were limitless; but when they come out they seem to be no bigger than normal things.”
― Stephen King, The Body

“But to believe that getting stuff is the purpose and aim of life is madness.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“Sometimes your best way to deal with shit is not to hold yourself as such a precious little prize.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you.”
― David Nicholls, One Day

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it's all in my mind.”
― Jack Kerouac

“What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it. ”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“Probably some of the best things that have ever happened to you in life, happened because you said yes to something. Otherwise things just sort of stay the same.”
― Danny Wallace, Yes Man

“i don’t pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, salt.

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode.

Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up; if not, I'll stay down here till I'm someone else.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“Pardon My Sanity In A World Insane”
― Emily Dickinson

“There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words..”
― Fydor Dostoyevsky

“We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“There are people whom one loves immediately and forever. Even to know they are alive in the world with one is quite enough.”
― Nancy Spain

“She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky