Vive > Vive's Quotes

“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Great men are not born great, they grow great . . .”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“I don't trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that's why they have godfathers.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“He smelled the garden, the yellow shield of light smote his eyes, and he whispered, "Life is so beautiful."
...
Yes, he thought, if I can die saying, "Life is so beautiful," then nothing else is important.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Michael could never remember his father ever having uttered a word about death, as if the Don respected death too much to philosophize about it.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“Never let anyone know what you are thinking.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, “I won’t count this time!” Well! He may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keeps faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology

“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

- Howl”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I was quiet, but I was not blind.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“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

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“And when you love someone you don’t always see them realistically.”
― P.C. Cast, Awakened

“Every time he looked at me I felt like I'd touched my tongue to the tip of a battery. In art class I'd watch him lean back and listen and I was nothing but zing and tingle. After a while, the tingle turned to electricity, and when he asked me out my whole body amped to a level where technically I should have been dead. I had nothing in common with a sheddy like him, but a girl doesn't think straight when she's that close to electrocution.”
― Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon

“When you develop an infatuation for someone you always find a reason to believe that this is exactly the person for you. It doesn’t need to be a good reason. Taking photographs of the night sky, for example. Now, in the long run, that’s just the kind of dumb, irritating habit that would cause you to split up. But in the haze of infatuation, it’s just what you’ve been searching for all these years.”
― Alex Garland, The Beach

“Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money and can't hold down a job.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“My love affair with (him) had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homonculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet (him) for who he was.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“He's become the one the songs are about, and while part of me knows he's probably worth that, another part is yelling at me to slow the fuck down.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home