Kyle > Kyle's Quotes

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.”
― Rabih Alameddine, Koolaids: The Art of War

“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.”
― William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance

“We are all migrants through time.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.”
― Mohsin Hamid

“He talks in proverbs. There’s nothing I can say in reply.”
― Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”
― Edward W. Said

“Every man has both a poetic obligation and a human obligation.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“They go to Paris to learn how to make bombs and they come back having learned only how to write poetry, which they think is more explosive.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“The future belongs to crowds.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“There is no such thing as forcing someone to be free.”
― Saleem Haddad

“What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“It really is a pathetic thing. To mourn a past you never had. Don't you think?”
― Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways

“I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Conquered people tend to be witty.”
― Saul Bellow

“Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke

“Wings that had been growing for years stretched and pushed and I found myself flying.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“I am not one of those women who can stand things.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Civilization begins with distillation”
― William Faulkner

“He's crossed all the oceans all around the world.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Dreams can never be made captive.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise