Philologosphang > Philologosphang's Quotes

“For what is God's will, but that we should be reconciled to ourselves.”
― Regina Ullmann, The Country Road

“Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.”
― Jan Morris

“There's nothing wrong with giving up all your principles for a suitable financial reward. It is indeed the basis of our society.”
― Manny Rayner

“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read.

If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.
”
― Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.

“Acknowledgements!
My thanks to Hollywood
When you showed me John Rambo
Stitching up his arm with no anaesthetic
And giving them “a war they won’t believe”
I knew then my calling, the job for me

Thanks also to the recruitment adverts
For showing me soldiers whizzing around on skis
And for sending sergeants to our school
To tell us of the laughs, the great food, the pay
The camaraderie

I am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debt
You paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimage
One year basking in the Garden of Eden
(I haven’t quite left yet)

Thanks to Mum and thanks to Dad
Fuck it,
Thanks to every parent
Flushing with pride for their brave young lads
Buying young siblings toy guns and toy tanks
Waiting at the airport
Waving their flags”
― Danny Martin

“the purpose of life is the life of purpose”
― Robin Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Why does the rain make us feel so romantic and strange? Maybe it's the fact that we are unnatural spectators of it, from inside our homes, and it is a reminder that we have the power to live our whole lives like this, if we choose. It's not the smell of fertile ground kicked up by raindrops, or the slick leaves, or the way we must amplify our voices to be heard over this larger presence. It's the power of the rooftop that makes us want to fuck under it.”
― Amelia Gray, AM/PM

“Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“Down the toilet, lookit me,
What a silly thing ta do!
Hope nobody takes a pee,
Yippy dippy dippy doo . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“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

“We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.”
― Isaiah Berlin

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“People want only special revolutions, in externals, in politics, and so on. But that's just tinkering. What is really is called for is a revolution of the human mind.”
― Hendrik Ibsen

“The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”
― Edwin Arlington Robinson

“October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”
― Helen Keller

“People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“We love to buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them.

[Inside Out (VH1)]”
― Warren Zevon

“Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“There's a beast in me. I destroy those I cannot control. I must be certain that those close to me share my identical interests. I'm benevolent within that construction. I'm ghastly outside of it.”
― James Ellroy, Perfidia