Aidan Holmes > Aidan's Quotes

“During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Sorrow concealèd, like an oven stopped,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.”
― William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

“I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
― Tom Waits

“I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“In order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.”
― Marquis de Sade

“I'm a drinker with writing problems.”
― Brendan Behan

“The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions — notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful — are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Nunc est bibendum!”
― Horace

“How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“Time wastes too fast : every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen ; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more -- every thing presses on -- whilst thou are twisting that lock, -- see! it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!”
― Tristram Shandy

“Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane