Frank Strada > Frank's Quotes

“Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself, may perhaps be called egotism; but nothing could be more opposed to ordinary egoism. For this love or pity for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the consciousness that just as before you were born you were not, so after your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity - that is, to love - all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance, these unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal darkness.”
― Miquel de Unamuno

“The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“. . . the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot

“Only those who know the supremacy of intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“To be utterly innocent would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“. . . I have gradually come to believe that what's written cannot simply be amended to suit some later preference and so I have decided this is the way I will go on, writing without amendments, transparently . . . as though any of what I wrote mattered in the slightest.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“The greatest tyranny of all is men's possession of women and women's possession of men. We want to own one another so that the other cannot outgrow us. You know how Chinese women bind their feet until the feet are deformed? This is what we do to one another's hearts.”
― Samantha Harvey, Dear Thief

“[The kids have] run around the grassy paths of their granddad's vegetable beds too many times. Let's play something, they say, but are out of ideas. . .

At that a tall figure appears in black with a scythe and says, I have a game.
Yeah?
Yeah. I won't tell you the rules, or what the aim of it is, but you have to play it anyway, and reside with the persistent feeling of playing it wrongly - though there are no rules and there is no aim - and when you have finished playing you will both die. OK?
Not really OK.
OK?
Not rea--
OK! Go, kids.
Off sloped the figure in black and the girl and boy, despite themselves, began to play the game for which there were no rules and no aim, because it seemed there was no choice.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

“I would wish for my last day to involve an act of freedom - a walk by the ocean, a long bike ride, something I love. . . . Final acts acquire holiness. . . If finality makes something holy then every moment is holy, because every moment could be the last. . . . Live each day as if it's your last, we think, and then we don't.”
― Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

“Giacometti said, “The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
― Annie Dillard, For the Time Being: Essays

“There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”
― Albert Camus

“What is success?
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.”
― William S. Burroughs

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”
― Philip Larkin, High Windows

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“Now Mrs. Greensleeve, who knew that she was going to die, thought of death in the same way a nightbound wanderer in the rain looks forward to a soft bed.”
― Gerald Kersh, The Song of the Flea

“Love gilds us over and makes us show fine things to one another for a time, but soon the gold wears off, and then again the native brass appears.”
― George Etherege, The Man of Mode

“The spark of consciousness is reflected in the river, where a dance of infinite faces lined in profane lights.”
― sir kristian goldmund aumann

“A day without laughter is a day wasted.”
― Nicolas Chamfort