Emily Jayne > Emily's Quotes

“I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“You have my whole heart. You always did. You're the best guy. You always were.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Civilised my syphilised yarbles.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn't lack. It's surplus energy- a claustrophobia inside your skin -”
― Chris Kraus

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Cease, cows, life is short.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.”
― Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

“I came to Paris with four écus in my pocket, and I’d have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

“Philosophy is odious and obscure;
Both law and physic are for petty wits;
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.
'Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

“I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“In no time, the platoon were on their feet in front of him, formed up into two ranks, and it struck him suddenly, and probably for the first time in his military career, that these men with their drilled precision were dead parts of dead machines that didn't produce anything.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“As he reached the door of the chapel and turned back for a last look, he saw that the Virgin too was sad and lonely; the most alone human being God ever put on earth.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy