Alexandra Girdler > Alexandra's Quotes

“there is no crime of which I cannot conceive myself guilty.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.”
― Marcel Proust

“I've been called worse things by better people.”
― Pierre Trudeau

“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“I have seen something of this world," she said over the trays, "and there are but two sorts of women in it-- those who take the strength out of a man, and those who put it back. Once I was that one, and now I am this.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Kim

“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“But I feel vanity is a part of art and the non-vain are really non-artistic.”
― Barry Webster, The Sound of All Flesh

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“A person’s first duty, a young person’s at any rate, is to be ambitious, and the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value.”
― G. H. Hardy (Author)

“Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.”
― Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

“Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.”
― Mortimer Brewster

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
― H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.”
― Albert Camus

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.”
― Richard Burton

“When considering marriage one should ask oneself this question; 'will I be able to talk with this person into old age?' Everything else is transitory, the most time is spent in conversation.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“It is said that the human brain divides its functions. The right brain is devoted to sensory impressions, emotions, colors, music. The left brain deals with abstract thought, logic, philosophy, analysis.

My definition of a great movie: While you’re watching it, it engages your right brain. When it’s over, it engages your left brain.”
― Roger Ebert

“Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“You have to let other people be right’ was his answer to their insults. ‘It consoles them for not being anything else.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“My father was often angry when I was most like him.”
― Lillian Hellman

“You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied… When I want to render these fine nuances, I do not find them in the subject, but in the nature of women in real life who seek unhealthy emotions and are too stupid even to understand the horror in the most appalling situations.”
― Gustave Moreau

“I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I’m sure that all this, I mean other people’s attitudes towards me, lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality