Mathilda Cullen > Mathilda's Quotes

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Nobody steals books but your friends.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Guns of Avalon

“I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.”
― Roger Zelazny, Frost & Fire

“To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.”
― Roger Zelazny, Sign of the Unicorn

“Good-bye and hello, as always.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Courts of Chaos

“I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Courts of Chaos

“When I said I wanted to die in my sleep, I meant I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Great Book of Amber

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

“Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“It's not as if our lives are simply divided into light and dark. There's a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like grey clouds reflected in a calm lake.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“This was an evil beyond thinking. The killing of a man was not so evil as the killing of a boat. For a boat does not have sons, and a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat does not heal.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again;
And who the hell are you anyway . . .?”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“It’s easy to repeat; it’s hard to speak,”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn’t. I didn’t know the words, the grammar, the syntax.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid