Matthew > Matthew's Quotes

“Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”
― W.H. Auden

“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
― W.H. Auden

“The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went