Karrah > Karrah's Quotes

“No doubt, this is the kind of stress the constantly mutating AIDS virus must feel.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”
― Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity

“She had never liked anything she did not excel at.”
― Grace D. Li, Portrait of a Thief

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words--"Wait and Hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“The feeling, for those seconds, is glorious—it reminds him that he is human, that he is so insignificant as to be utterly free, and he is being guided along gracefully, lovingly, by the hand of Nature—and it frees him, however transiently, from all worry and fear and fury and grief. 'I enjoyed that,' he says aloud, as much to the stars as to the rower.”
― Doug Dorst, S.

“What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin.”
― Doug Dorst, S.

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail - we are ruined by forces beyond our control.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Winter never lets you forget you’re alive. Maybe that’s why it makes people sad.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“Ralph was being pummeled by the full typhoon of his love for her, one of life’s cruelest tricks, that the extent of this love waits to reveal itself.”
― Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing

“But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face--there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
― John Fowles, The Magus