Shamim E. Haque > Shamim's Quotes

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“You can't think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you think about them naturally or you don't think at all.”
― Alberto Moravia, Boredom

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“One of the odd things about Stendhal is that though he was always on the watch lest anyone made a fool of him, he was constantly making a fool of himself.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Ten Novels and Their Authors

“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
― Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
― Herman Melville

“I've been in love with you for weeks.'
There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.'
Haven't you ever been in love, then?'
When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.'
What the hell does that mean?'
We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.”
― David Lodge

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out—a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes—like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much....”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.”
― Stendhal, Five Short Novels of Stendhal

“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend. ”
― Jim Harrison

“IRELAND
Spenserian Sonnet
abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee

What is it about the Kelly velvet hillsides and the hoary avocado sea,
The vertical cliffs where the Gulf Stream commences its southern bend,
Slashing like a sculptor gone mad or a rancorous God who’s angry,
Heaving galaxies of lichen shrouded stones for potato farmers to tend,
Where the Famine and the Troubles such haunting aspects lend,
Music and verse ring with such eloquence in their whimsical way,
Let all, who can hear, rejoice as singers’ intonations mend,
Gaelic souls from Sligo and Trinity Green to Cork and Dingle Bay,
Where fiddle, bodhran, tin whistle, and even God, indulge to play,
Ould sod to Beckett, Wilde and Yeats, Heaney and James Joyce,
In this verdant, welcoming land, ‘tis the poet who rules the day.
Where else can one hear a republic croon in so magnificent a voice?
Primal hearts of Celtic chieftains pulse, setting inspiration free,
In genial confines of chic caprice, we’re stirred by synchronicity.”
― David B. Lentz, Sonnets from New England: Love Songs

“As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.”
― Federico García Lorca

“For, to be woken up at five in the morning by the devotional treacle of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan and other confectioners, all of them simultaneously droning out from several different cassette players; to be relentlessly assaulted for the rest of the day and most of the night by the alternately over-earnest and insolent voices of Kumar Sanu, Alisha Chinoy, Baba Sehgal singing 'Sexy, Sexy, Sexy', and 'Ladki hai kya re baba', 'Sarkaye leyo khatiya' and other hideous songs; to have them insidiously leak into your memory and become moronic refrains running over and over again in your mind; to have your environment polluted and your day destroyed in this way was to know a deepening rage, an impulse to murder, and, finally, a creeping fear at one's own dangerous level of derangement. It was to understand the perfectly sane people you read about in the papers, who suddenly explode into violence one fine day; it was to conceive a lasting hatred for the perpetrators, rich or poor, of these auditory atrocities. (on why he left Varanasi after a few days)”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India

“I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Only a psychopath would ever think of doing these things, only a psychopath would dream of abusing other people in such a way, only a psychopath would treat people as less than human just for money. The shocking truth is, even though they now have most if not all of the money, they want still more, they want all of the money that you have left in your pockets, they want it all because they have no empathy with other people, with other creatures, they have no feeling for the world which they exploit, they have no love or sense of being or belonging for their souls are dead, dead to all things but greed and a desire to rule over others.”
― Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism

“The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“Sorrow and love ― life, in other words ― cannot be considered a sickness because they hurt.”
― Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
― Voltaire

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!”
― Connie Willis, Passage

“Shall I revise or rewrite
My October Symphony?
...and change the dedication
from Revolution to Revelation?
– Pet Shop Boys”
― Neil Tennant

“The lesson here is not to take Camus to the beach.”
― Leo X. Robertson

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Only a mediocre person is always at his best. ”
― W. Somerset Maugham