Elari > Elari's Quotes

“Be obscure clearly.”
― E.B. White

“I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”
― Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With André

“The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight,the weight we carry is love. ”
― Allen Ginsberg

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean, a small German hare.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues — every stately or lovely emblazoning — the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge — pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.”
― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979

“Suicide

How would I know I don’t suffer any more, if I’m dead?”
― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977–September 15, 1979

“The only good human being is a dead one.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Si l'on ne se définit qu'en s'opposant, j'étais l'indéfini en chair et en os; si l'amour et la haine sont l'avers et le revers de la même médaille, je n'aimais rien ni personne. C'était bien fait: on ne peut pas demander à la fois de haïr et de plaire. Ni de plaire et d'aimer.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots

“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Le génie n'est qu'un prêt: il faut le mériter par de grandes souffrances, par des épreuves modestement, fermement traversées; on finit par entendre des voix et l'on écrit sous la dictée.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Les mots et autres écrits autobiographiques

“My sister was the one who told me where babies come from. My sister was also the one who laughed when I immediately asked her where babies go to.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Les grandes personnes, établies dans mon âme, montraient du doigt mon étoile; je ne la voyais pas mais je voyais le doigt, je croyais en elles qui prétendaient croire en moi.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“How can you hide from what never goes away?”
― Heraclitus

“Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“Colonel Matterson reading from wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand:

The flag is America. America is the plum. The peach. The watermelon. America is the gumdrop. The pumpkin seed. America is television.

Now, the cross is Mexico. Mexico is the walnut. The hazelnut. The acorn. Mexico is the rainbow. The rainbow is wooden. Mexico is wooden.

Now, the green sheep is Canada Canada is the fir tree. The wheat field. The calendar.

The night is the Pacific Ocean.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Good luck and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories