Tim Cribbs > Tim's Quotes

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“...unrequited love does not die; it's only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.”
― Elle Newmark, The Book of Unholy Mischief

“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Nature always wins. It has never lost, and I pray it never will.”
― Mike Ma , Harassment Architecture

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Because, if you could love someone, and keep loving them, without being loved back . . . then that love had to be real. It hurt too much to be anything else.”
― Sarah Cross, Kill Me Softly

“If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.”
― Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron

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

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the PRIVACY of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”
― Dostoyevsky Fyodor

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956