Mark > Mark's Quotes

“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”
― Andy Warhol

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”
― Henry Miller

“I would prefer not to.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick, or Harry, year in, year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on my common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but "us," the jerks of infinity. We'd burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us by our pride.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.”
― Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings

“If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live”
― Lin Yutang

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”
― Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

“There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.”
― Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Always avoid taking care of your health, believe me! ... Every question asked of your body becomes a breach ... through which anxiety, obsession, will enter ...”
― Ferdinand Céline

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
No, what?' I would say.
A piece of dust.'
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way— either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

“truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.”
― Herman Melville

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

“I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I’m proud of myself for dissenting from life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Free

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy”
― Henry Miller

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”
― franz kafka

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
― Franz Kafka

“Why kid ourselves, people have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all. They try to unload their unhappiness on someone else when making love, they do their damnedest, but it doesn't work, they keep it all, and then they start all over again, trying to find a place for it. "Your pretty, Mademoiselle," they say. And life takes hold of them again until the next time, and then they try the same little gimmick. "You're very pretty, Mademoiselle..."

And in between they boast that they've succeeded in getting rid of their unhappiness, but everyone knows it's not true and they've simply kept it all to themselves. Since at the little game you get uglier and more repulsive as you grow older, you can't hope to hide your unhappiness, your bankruptcy, any longer. In the end your features are marked with that hideous grimace that takes twenty, thrity years or more to climb form your belly to your face. That's all a man is good for, that and no more, a grimace that he takes a whole lifetime to compose. The grimace a man would need to express his true soul without losing any of it is so heavy and complicated that he doesn't always succeed in completing it.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine