Sean > Sean's Quotes

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“He walked on without resting. He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him - he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him... .”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”
― Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka's The Castle

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
― William S. Burroughs

“There is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“Nobody knows you.
You don't know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own imaginings?”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

“He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“If I am ever to find these trees meaningful
I must have you by the hand. As it is, they
stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky,
and the snow looks up like a face dirtied
with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens?
There could only be a stranger wandering
in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself
frozen fast in wintry eyes.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea...”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best. ”
― Walt Whitman

“No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing. ”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“Hemingway said:
'It don't come anymore.'
So where did it go?”
― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.”
― Norman Mailer

“America…is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV> Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.”
― Norman Mailer

“I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.”
― Antonin Artaud, Lettres à Génica Athanasiou

“The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.”
― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

“each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand —
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha . . .
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know . . .

— PULL A STRING, A PUPPET MOVES . . .”
― Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

“An anxiety with no object or purpose in the present, and in the future nothing but endless sacrifice, by means of which he would attain nothing - that was what his days on earth held in store for him... What good was life to him? What prospects did he have? What did he have to strive for? Was he to live merely in order to exist? But a thousand times before he had been ready to give up his existence for an idea, for a hope, even for an imagining. Existence on its own had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more than that. Perhaps it was merely the strength of his own desires that made him believe he was a person to whom more was allowed than others.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“The ways of sin are curious . . . I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden