Yu > Yu's Quotes

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“...memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Mary

“So kehrt alles zurück, alles in ewiger Jugendpracht !”
― Max Brod

“Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.”
― Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“But why must everything have a practical application? I'd been such a diligent soldier for years - working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved ones, my gums and my credit record, voting, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty? In this dark period of loss, did I need any justification for learning Italian other than that it was the only thing I could imagine bringing me any pleasure right now?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“A goal is a dream with a deadline”
― Napoleon Hill

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Time is how you spend your love.”
― Zadie Smith

“People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.”
― Tennessee Williams , The Glass Menagerie

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”
― Susan Sontag

“I’ve been labeled before. I’m supposed to be a jock and then a brain and then one of those music/theater people. I guess I like to keep surprising people. But what kind of life can you live in a tiny square box? My personality is less narrow. I like a lot of different things. But still, people like to be able to put you in a category, to be able to place you in even rows and put a sign at the front. They think the best you can achieve is being at the front of your row…but why not form your own row? Isn’t that the definition of being a leader?

Maybe taking charge means something different nowadays. How come lately people think you’re a leader just because you happen to be at the front of the line? A good leader need only point the way and watch as others follow a direction, not a figure. A great leader can lead without anyone ever knowing it. A spectacular leader can lead without ever knowing it themselves. The person at the front of the line is the puppet of someone that you couldn’t name because someone else pointed the way. I must have missed something. I thought being a follower was letting other people shape your life. I thought it meant letting other people decide who you were going to be.

I won’t conform. I won’t let people class me. Because once you’re there you’re stuck. I will be whoever I want to be, and no one can stop me. I have something they don’t have, which is nothing to lose. I have my entire life to live and I intend to live it the way I would like to live. I will form my own row. I will point in a new direction. If that means going against other peoples’ opinion of normal, then so be it. Who says normal is right? Normal certainly strikes me as a boring way to live my life.”
― K.D. Enos

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.”
― Eugene O'Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“The most celebrated American author of the twentieth century, Bellow objected during the first part of his career to being designated a “Jewish writer, ” but it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American regionalism. Yet he did not have to write about Jews in order to write as a Jew. Bellow's curious mingling of laughter and trembling is particularly manifest in his novel Henderson the Rain King, that follows an archetypal Protestant American into mythic Africa. Bellow not only influenced and paved the way for other American Jewish writers like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick, but naturalized the immigrant voice: the American novel came to seem freshly authentic when it spoke in the voice of one of its discernible minorities.”
― Hana Wirth-Nesher, The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature

“I know not by what power I am drawn to you, but it is as a moth is drawn to the flame, and I cannot fight it, I must be consumed.”
― Andrea Zuvich, His Last Mistress

“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Kindness is stronger than fear.”
― Cicero

“How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
― Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In the house of shadows where the legend rises the deciphering begins”
― W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001

“An unhappy land, then, is one whose citizens no longer know where duty lies, and seek a charismatic leader who tells them what to do. Which, if I remember correctly, is what Hitler promulgated in Mein Kampf.”
― Umberto Eco, Chronicles of a Liquid Society

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“運用一個妳其實並不懂的詞，這根本是犯罪，就像一個人心中沒有愛卻說我愛妳一樣。”
― 林奕含, 房思琪的初戀樂園

“思琪在家一面整理行李，一面用一種天真的口吻對媽媽說：「聽說學校有個同學跟老師在一起。」「誰？」「不認識。」「這麼小年紀就這麼騷。」思琪不說話了。她一瞬間決定從此一輩子不說話了。”
― 林奕含, 房思琪的初戀樂園

“原來，人對他者的痛苦是毫無想像力的......在這個人人爭著稱自己為輸家的年代，沒有人要承認世界上有一群女孩才是真正的輸家。......”
― 林奕含, 房思琪的初戀樂園