Robert Rich > Robert's Quotes

“...I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.'

What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education.'

Employers sense in me a denial of their values.' He rolled over onto his back. 'They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Everything terrible is something that needs our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it’s quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I wandered beneath the sun-dappled shade from the trees, surrounded by the warm fragrances of the forest, thinking that I was in the middle of my life. Not life as an age, not halfway along life’s path, but in the middle of my existence. My heart trembled.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“Traffic was stopped dead and I nudged the window switch and listened to the blowing horns approach peak volume. We were trapped in our own obsessive clamor.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”
― Mark Twain

“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
― Marcel Proust

“The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.”
― Proust, Marcel

“As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“And this is what we call life! − If damnation truly is eternal! Isn’t the man who tries to mutilate himselfdamned then? I think I am in hell, therefore I am. It’s the fault of the catechism. I’m a slave to my baptism.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“The 2-Man seniorest males’ bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it and a calligraphic poster saying EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT, and the answer to Gately’s knock is a moan,”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It seems there are two kinds of American writers. Those who drink, and those who used to.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“He said, “WHY DON’T YOU EAT MEAT, PRIVATE? ARE YOU RICH?” He talked like a Chicano Macho Man Randy Savage. I said I wasn’t rich. He said, “I SAW A SHOW ON TV. IT SAID THAT PEOPLE WHO DON’T EAT MEAT HAVE WEAK MINDS. THEY ARE EASY TO BRAINWASH. THAT MEANS THAT YOU ARE EASY TO BRAINWASH.” “YES, DRILL SERGEANT.”
― Nico Walker, Cherry

“Her eyes—green—were bright, merciful, sometimes given to melancholy, not entirely guileless. And I’d listen to her tell me about the abandoned factories and the cemetery where she’d grown up, the places where she’d skinned her knees. And her voice took me over. This is how you find the one to break your heart.”
― Nico Walker, Cherry

“Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is - it's revenge.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five