Stephanie > Stephanie's Quotes

“I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime. ”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume 1: 1903-1917

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick

“Distract me, please”
― Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

“Don’t you just hate nights like that, when you think over every mistake you’ve made, every hurt you’ve received, every bit of meanness you’ve dealt out? There’s no profit in it, no point to it, and you need sleep.”
― Charlaine Harris, Dead and Gone

“Finally, a human man saw me as intensely valuable. Just my luck he was happily married and thought I was a freak.”
― Charlaine Harris, Dead and Gone

“No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”
― Maya Angelou

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.”
― Robert Orben

“I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.”
― Peter Ustinov

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
― Irina Dunn

“Hey. Sometimes life is a shit flavored Popsicle.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Nature Girl

“Of course I’ve gone mad with power! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It’s boring and no one listens to you!
— Russ Cargill”
― Matt Groening