Rambling Reader > Rambling Reader's Quotes

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren't authentic; they're just dead”
― Kwame Anthony Appiah

“How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“I've got a library copy of Gone with the Wind, a quart of milk and all these cookies. Wow! What an orgy!”
― Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

“Do you know a cure for me?"

"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."

"Salt water?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“In a time of destruction, create something.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston

“This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

“What is that unforgettable line?”
― Samuel Beckett

“Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”
― Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“When all else fails, philosophize.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.”
― J.M. Coetzee

“I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”
― Edith Sitwell

“You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.”
― Kathryn Davis

“In my lap I had my dear little pug, the smell of whose ears will always be sweeter to me than all the perfumes of Araby and the scent of heliotrope combined.”
― Kathryn Davis, Versailles

“What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully'--not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

“If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others.”
― Armand Marie Leroi, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body

“Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Duchamp had taken art to its logical conclusion.
Every act of perception is art.
So everything that perceives is an artist.”
― Chris F. Westbury, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
― Marcel Proust

“All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.”
― Paul Valéry

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
― Joan Didion

“[Philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the offing, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel