Jamie Clark > Jamie's Quotes

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.”
― Oscar Wilde, Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde including the Ballad of Reading Gaol

“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.”
― Mark Twain

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

“No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en.
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“There's small choice in rotten apples.”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“Sit by my side, and let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“We will have rings and things and fine array”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“He kills her in her own humor.”
― Shakespeare

“No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Old boy," said Grimes, "you're in love."
"Nonsense!"
"Smitten?" said Grimes.
"No, no."
"The tender passion?"
"No."
"Cupid's jolly little darts?"
"No."
"Spring fancies, love's young dream?"
"Nonsense!"
"Not even a quickening of the pulse?"
"No."
"A sweet despair?"
"Certainly not."
"A trembling hope?"
"No."
"A frisson? a Je ne sais quoi?"
"Nothing of the sort."
"Liar!" said Grimes.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.”
― Robert Burns, Collected Poems of Robert Burns

“Better once than never, for never too late.”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“In the same way, the action Adelaida Ivanovna Miusov was doubtless an echo of foreign influences, the chafings of a mind imprisoned”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“For the time being you, too, are toying, out of despair, with your magazine articles and drawing-room discussions without believing in your own dialectics and smirking at them with your heart aching inside you”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Mankind will find strength in itself to live for virtue, even without believing in the immortality of the soul! Find it in the love of liberty, equality, fraternity...”
― FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?”
― Jack Kerouac

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

“I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't when he does feel like it. ”
― James Agate