Hil > Hil's Quotes

“Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”
― Tennessee Williams

“It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“For a moment, I thought of the word happy and it was a word that just, well, it felt like it was visiting me. I knew it wouldn’t last for very long and I’d be sad again and then it would be worse because it’s one thing to be sad and it’s another thing to be sad once you’ve been happy. Being sad after you’ve been happy is the worst thing in the world.”
― Benjamin Alire Saenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“Cruelty isn't a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“I didn't understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without meanness?”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I was harder than Dante. I think I'd tried to hide that hardness from him because I'd wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he wasn't hard.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“This habit of getting used to things is the reason that we seem to forget so quickly. The day before yesterday we were still under fire, today we are fooling about, seeing what we can scrounge around here, tomorrow we’ll be back in the trenches. In fact we don’t really forget anything. All the time we are out here the days at the front sink into us like stones the moment they are over, because they are too much for us to think about right away. If we even tried, they would kill us. Because one thing has become clear to me: you can cope with all the horror as long as you simply duck thinking about it – but it will kill you if you try to come to terms with it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I love him, his shoulders, his angular, stooping figure – and at the same time I see behind him woods and stars, and a clear voice utters words that bring me peace, to me, a soldier in big boots, belt, and a knapsack, taking the road that lies before him under the high heaven, quickly forgetting and seldom sorrowful, for ever pressing on under the wide night sky.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.”
― Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories

“I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

“The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“This is just shit. It's happening. No blame. Happening and on the rise it would appear. What can we do to delay it? Probably zilch. To stop it? Likely less. But to survive it? Now that sounds more promising. There is evidence of bad shit having been survived before. Ancient Advice Left in cave by Wise French Caveman: "When Bigbad Shit come, no run scream hide. Try paint picture of it on wall. Drum to it. Sing to it. Dance to it. This give you handle on it." So Twister is my try.
Ken Kesey in a letter to Allen Ginsberg (August 1993)”
― Ken Kesey

“People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.”
― Ken Kesey

“I feel like a donkey, with a stick in my mouth and a carrot up my ass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.”
― Anton Chekhov

“... We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We slept, all six of us, beneath a wooden roof that let in the stars, warming one another, our legs intermingled. I dreamed: and in my dreams saw women. But my heart, stained with bloodshed, grated and brimmed over.”
― Isaac Babel

“The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill.”
― Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel

“This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."

[Women Know Everything!]”
― Dorothy Parker

“What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot. ”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“I have been running all about; I have knocked again at all the doors of my youth and desired to enter in there; I thought, surely it must admit me again, for I am still young and have wished so much to forget; but it fled always before me like a will-o'-the-wisp; it fell away without a sound; it crumbled like tinder at my lightest touch. And I could not understand.--Surely here at least something of it must remain? I attempted it again and again, and as a result made myself merely ridiculous and wretched. But now I know. I know now that a still, silent war has ravaged this country of my memories also; I know now it would be useless for me to look farther. Time lies between like a great gulf; I cannot get back. There is nothing for it; I must go forward, march onward, anywhere; it matters nothing, for I have no goal”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

“What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Iorek Byrnison: Can is not the same as must.
Lyra Silvertongue: But if you must and you can, then there's no excuse.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn't think of him -- didn't speak to him in her head, didn't relive every moment they'd been together, didn't long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.”
― Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials - The Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass

“It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read.”
― Philip Pullman