Layma Basharyar > Layma's Quotes

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity.”
― Samuel Beckett

“But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?”
― Samuel Beckett

“I seem to grasp at certain moments the nuance that divides bad from worse.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?”
― William Hazlitt

“have I not the reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.”
― William Hazlitt, On The Pleasure of Hating

“Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.”
― William Hazlitt

“He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.”
― William Hazlitt

“I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it.”
― William Hazlitt, On The Pleasure of Hating

“Never so sure our rapture to create
As when it touch'd the brink of all we hate.”
― William Hazlitt

“The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.”
― William Hazlitt, Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims

“Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.”
― William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers

“He said that in a way being loved is like being told you never have to die.”
― Timothy Findley, The Wars

“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the
personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am
willing to excuse a thousand faults.”
― W. Somerset Maugham , The Moon and Sixpence

“Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Something that is loved is never lost.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I'm not frightened. I'm not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“There's little in taking or giving
There's little in water or wine
This living, this living , this living
was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
the gain of the one at the top
for art is a form of catharsis
and love is a permanent flop
and work is the province of cattle
and rest's for a clam in a shell
so I'm thinking of throwing the battle
would you kindly direct me to hell?”
― Dorothy Parker

“So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me for I, too, am fluent in silence.”
― R. Arnold

“and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners