Kade > Kade's Quotes

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
― Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Nameless City

“I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I... I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness. We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Those of us in medicine don’t help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“To empathize with these patients, to put yourself in their shoes, may be a bit too existentially disconcerting. And so doctors unconsciously try to protect themselves by widening the moat between their own good health and their patients’ dauntingly mortal conditions”
― Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

“Burnout also leads to a large swath of physicians who aren't as empathetic toward their patients as they could be.”
― Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of
beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism
is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful
things are corrupt without being charming.
This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings
in beautiful things are the cultivated.
For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written.
That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of
Realism is the rage of Caliban
seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of
Romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the
subject-matter of the artist, but the morality
of art consists in the perfect use of an im-
perfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even
things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An
ethical sympathy in an artist is an un-
pardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist
can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist
instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials
for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all
the arts is the art of the musician. From the
point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the
Type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at
their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at
their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really
Mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art
shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord
with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful
thing as long as he does not admire it. The
only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.”
― Oscar Wilde., The Picture of Dorian Gray

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.”
― Oscar Wilde., The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.
This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.
For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.”
― Oscar Wilde., The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written.
That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde.

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.”
― Epicurus

“We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love. That remains the main problem and paradox for the frail. Many of the things that we want for those we care about are things that we would adamantly oppose for ourselves because they would infringe upon our sense of self.”
― Atul Gawande

“Much of what has been written about that moment homes in on the word “conscience.” Luther declared, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” He continued, “To go against conscience is neither safe nor right.”1 But so many historians have conflated our modern ideas about conscience with Luther’s very different ideas about it that we have accepted a deeply mistaken idea about what Luther meant, and therefore about what his stand at Worms meant. Of course Luther never said the English word “conscience”; that word is a translation from his German and Latin. The words he used, usually translated as “conscience,” cannot perfectly be translated as what we today mean by that word. The German word he used, Gewissen, really means “knowing.” And the Latin word, conscientia, means “with knowing.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“Nature doesn’t know the concept of philosophy, Geralt of Rivia. The pathetic–ridiculous–attempts which people undertake to try to understand nature are typically termed philosophy. The results of such attempts are also considered philosophy. It’s as though a cabbage tried to investigate the causes and effects of its existence, called the result of these reflections “an eternal and mysterious conflict between head and root”, and considered rain an unfathomable causative power. We, sorcerers, don’t waste time puzzling out what nature is. We know what it is; for we are nature ourselves. Do you understand?’ ‘I’m trying to, but please talk more slowly. Don’t forget you’re talking to a cabbage.’ ‘Have”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Time of Contempt

“That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I think you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction, and they’re very different. Almost none of us commit suicide, whereas almost all of us self-destruct. Somehow. In some part of our lives. We drink, or take drugs, or destabilize the happy job”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The word "Annihilation" was followed by "help induce immediate suicide."

We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Was I in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Touchstone watched, suddenly conscious that he probably only had five seconds left to be alone with Sabriel, to say something, to say anything. Perhaps the last five seconds they ever would have alone together.
I am not afraid, he said to himself.
"I love you," he whispered. "I hope you don't mind.”
― Garth Nix, Sabriel

“I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe. I was a child yesterday. I had not forgotten. But Maxim’s grandmother, sitting there in her shawl with her poor blind eyes, what did she feel, what was she thinking? Did she know that Beatrice was yawning and glancing at her watch? Did she guess that we had come to visit her because we felt it right, it was a duty, so that when she got home afterwards Beatrice would be able to say, “Well, that clears my conscience for three months”? Did she ever think about Manderley? Did she remember sitting at the dining room table, where I sat? Did she too have tea under the chestnut tree? Or was it all forgotten and laid aside, and was there nothing left behind that calm, pale face of hers but little aches and little strange discomforts, a blurred thankfulness when the sun shone, a tremor when the wind blew cold? I wished that I could lay my hands upon her face and take the years away. I wished I could see her young, as she was once, with color in her cheeks and chestnut hair, alert and active as Beatrice by her side, talking as she did about hunting, hounds, and horses. Not sitting there with her eyes closed while the nurse thumped the pillows behind her head. “We’ve got a treat today, you know,” said the nurse, “watercress sandwiches for tea. We love watercress, don’t we?”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting qite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca