Ryan Corbitt > Ryan's Quotes

“It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

“For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“A happy past cripples people. They cling to it with nowhere better to go. Nothing to improve upon.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Adjustment Day

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“For the only safe harbour in this life's tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident, squaring the breast to take without skulking or flinching whatever fortune hurls at us.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Society is nothing more than people cooperating with other people they'd much rather murder.”
― David Wong, What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror

“You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“You don't know this, 'cause you're too young," came the usual lecture, "but the politicians run all the big scams. Government's the thief of all time. That's why it tries so hard to catch thieves - it doesn't like the competition”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“He was aware that he was not completely sane, so he kept himself in rigid check, playing both jailer and prisoner.”
― Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here

“Joe knew that all human beings are the star of their own very important film, a film in which they are both camera and actor; a film in which they are always playing the fearful and lonely hero who gets up each day hoping to finally strike upon the life they are meant to lead, though they never do.”
― Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured―disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui―in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“That is what whores are for, after all; to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters