Eliya > Eliya's Quotes

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  • #1
    William Golding
    “Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.”
    William Golding, Lord of the Flies

  • #2
    William Golding
    “The greatest ideas are the simplest.”
    William Golding, Lord of the Flies

  • #3
    William Golding
    “The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.”
    William Golding, Lord of the Flies

  • #4
    William Golding
    “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”
    William Golding, Lord of the Flies

  • #5
    William Golding
    “If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?”
    William Golding, Lord of the Flies

  • #6
    Stephen Chbosky
    “Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines
    he wrote a poem
    And he called it "Chops"
    because that was the name of his dog

    And that's what it was all about
    And his teacher gave him an A
    and a gold star
    And his mother hung it on the kitchen door
    and read it to his aunts
    That was the year Father Tracy
    took all the kids to the zoo

    And he let them sing on the bus
    And his little sister was born
    with tiny toenails and no hair
    And his mother and father kissed a lot
    And the girl around the corner sent him a
    Valentine signed with a row of X's

    and he had to ask his father what the X's meant
    And his father always tucked him in bed at night
    And was always there to do it

    Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines
    he wrote a poem
    And he called it "Autumn"

    because that was the name of the season
    And that's what it was all about
    And his teacher gave him an A
    and asked him to write more clearly
    And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
    because of its new paint

    And the kids told him
    that Father Tracy smoked cigars
    And left butts on the pews
    And sometimes they would burn holes
    That was the year his sister got glasses
    with thick lenses and black frames
    And the girl around the corner laughed

    when he asked her to go see Santa Claus
    And the kids told him why
    his mother and father kissed a lot
    And his father never tucked him in bed at night
    And his father got mad
    when he cried for him to do it.


    Once on a paper torn from his notebook
    he wrote a poem
    And he called it "Innocence: A Question"
    because that was the question about his girl
    And that's what it was all about
    And his professor gave him an A

    and a strange steady look
    And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
    because he never showed her
    That was the year that Father Tracy died
    And he forgot how the end
    of the Apostle's Creed went

    And he caught his sister
    making out on the back porch
    And his mother and father never kissed
    or even talked
    And the girl around the corner
    wore too much makeup
    That made him cough when he kissed her

    but he kissed her anyway
    because that was the thing to do
    And at three a.m. he tucked himself into bed
    his father snoring soundly

    That's why on the back of a brown paper bag
    he tried another poem

    And he called it "Absolutely Nothing"
    Because that's what it was really all about
    And he gave himself an A
    and a slash on each damned wrist
    And he hung it on the bathroom door
    because this time he didn't think

    he could reach the kitchen.”
    Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

  • #7
    “On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays

    1. A beginning ends what an end begins.

    2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.

    3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself.

    4. The best time is stolen time.

    5. All work is the avoidance of harder work.

    6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

    7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music.

    8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?

    9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation.

    10. Writer: how books read each other.

    11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love.

    12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything.

    13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough.

    14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.

    15. There are silences harder to take back than words.

    16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.

    17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.

    18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

    19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.

    20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do.

    21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of.

    22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.

    23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open).

    24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?”
    James Richardson

  • #8
  • #9
    William Shakespeare
    “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
    William Shakespeare

  • #10
    Albert Camus
    “I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.”
    Albert Camus, L'Étranger

  • #11
    Albert Camus
    “If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #12
    Albert Camus
    “I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so?”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #13
    Albert Camus
    “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #14
    Albert Camus
    “Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.”
    Albert Camus, L'Étranger

  • #15
    Albert Camus
    “She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #16
    Albert Camus
    “I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #17
    Albert Camus
    “After awhile you could get used to anything.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #18
    Albert Camus
    “It is better to burn than to disappear.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #19
    Albert Camus
    “Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #20
    Albert Camus
    “Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #21
    Albert Camus
    “I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness. ”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #22
    Albert Camus
    “One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #23
    Albert Camus
    “Thus, I always began by assuming the worst; my appeal was dismissed. That meant, of course, I was to die. Sooner than others, obviously. 'But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.' And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-- since, in either case, other men will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #24
    Albert Camus
    “But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #25
    Albert Camus
    “I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #26
    Albert Camus
    “Everything is true, and nothing is true!”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #27
    Albert Camus
    “On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #28
    Albert Camus
    “I couldn't quite understand how an ordinary man's good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger

  • #29
    Albert Camus
    “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
    Albert Camus, L'Étranger

  • #30
    Albert Camus
    “I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine”
    Albert Camus, The Stranger



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