Charlie > Charlie's Quotes

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

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“What you risk reveals what you value.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing”
― David Lodge, Small World

“I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me. ”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.”
― Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery

“As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.”
― Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery

“The most subversive people are those who ask questions.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.”
― Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery

“Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“... the only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder...”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“We are our choices.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Le diable et le bon dieu

“Words are loaded pistols.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“You are -- your life, and nothing else.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“In love, one and one are one.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays