Mike > Mike's Quotes

“Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence; your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves

“Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.”
― Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge: A Play in Two Acts

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
― Socrates

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.”
― Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon 38

“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. ”
― W.C. Fields

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
― George S. Patton

“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”
― Voltaire

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
― Mark Twain

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“If you aren't rich you should always look useful.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“An Immense hatred keeps me alive... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.”
― Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

“Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before! What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!”
― Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life