Steven Rainer > Steven's Quotes

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“--Here, my good man. Could you tell me whereabouts Horatio Street...good heavens.

Thus called upon, he took courage; the sursum corda of an extravagant belch straightened him upright, and he answered, --Whfffck? Whether this was an approach to discussion he had devised himself, or a subtle adaptation of the Socratic method of questioning perfected in the local athenaeums which he attended until closing time, was not to be known; for the answer was,

--Stand aside.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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

“Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.”
― Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat

“The Sloth would sit on his couch, paralyzed by all the things he wasn't taking care of. Then one day, a Wednesday, he just said, 'Fuck it!' He threw his hands up into the air and said, 'Fuck it!' This was the day that the sloth discovered his superpower, an amazing ability to say 'Fuck it' and really, truly mean it.”
― Andrew Kaufman, All My Friends are Superheroes

“How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with low intelligence.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“People who are going to get along really well know it almost as soon as they meet. You spend a little while talking and everyone starts to feel this conviction, you're all equally sure that you're at the beginning of something good. That's how it is when you meet people you're going to be with for a long time.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― Charles Bukowski

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Make your own victories. Make your own mistakes.”
― Joan Jett

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time