Lauren > Lauren's Quotes

“We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
― John Steinbeck

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
― John Steinbeck

“To be alive at all is to have scars.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning...to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“I would prove to the men how mistaken they are in thinking that they no longer
fall in love when they grow old--not knowing that they grow old when they stop
falling in love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
”
― Eric Hoffer

“It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay. ”
― Eric Hoffer

“Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.”
― Eric Hoffer

“...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.”
― Eric Hoffer

“Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.”
― Eric Hoffer

“There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate whenever they meet.”
― Eric Hoffer

“We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.”
― Eric Hoffer

“When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”
― Eric Hoffer