Ana > Ana's Quotes

“The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.

["Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming," The Westminster Review, 1885.]”
― George Eliot

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it
are no longer the same interpreters.”
― George Eliot

“Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
― George Eliot

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
― Aldous Huxley

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I’m an egotist, but I’m not selfish. There’s a difference. I’m a neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself. It isn’t that I think myself so important... I simply can’t think about anything else, that’s all. If I could fall in love with a woman that might help some. But I can’t find a woman who interests me.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests. ”
― Henry Miller

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

“Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning--it was ultimately indigestible.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You

“Svaka nepravda je jednaka, a čovjeku se čini da je najveća koja je njemu učinjena. A ako mu se čini, onda i jeste tako, jer ne može se misliti tuđom glavom.”
― Mesa Selimovic

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“And now she was thinking of her own death, with her heart gripped not by fear but by the excitement of a great discovery, the feeling that she was about to learn what she had been unable to learn from her brief experience of love. What she thought about death was childish, but what could never have touched her in the past now filled her with poignant tenderness, as sometimes a familiar face we see suddenly with the eyes of love makes us aware that it has been dearer to us than life itself for longer than we have ever realized.”
― Georges Bernanos, Mouchette

“I have felt that some sort of awful shame is attached to my name and that I have somehow brought this shame along from somewhere I have never been, and that I have carried this sin as my sin even though I have never committed it; this sin pursues me all my life, which life is undoubtedly not my own even thought I live it , I suffer from it die of it.”
― Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child

“And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!”
― Charles Baudelaire

“No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say, ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.

Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They
have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“No true love is possible, Lewis demonstrates, until we abandon our claims, our rights, our grievances. Until then we will be trapped in the obscurity of our heart's mixed motives, our will to possess, to control, to be our own gods.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind

“[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Island of the World