Pankaj > Pankaj's Quotes

“Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit!”
― Bill Maher

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

“In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“When I lie waking all alone,
Recounting what I have ill done,
My thoughts on me then tyrannize,
Fear and sorrow me surprise,
Whether I tarry still or go,
Methinks the time moves very slow,
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so sad as melancholy.
'Tis my sole plague to be alone,
I am a beast, a monster grown,
I will no light nor company,
I find it now my misery.
The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone,
Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.
All my griefs to this are folly,
Naught so fierce as melancholy.”
― Robert Burton

“No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as [love] can do with a single thread.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“I returned from the village. The house seemed unbearably dull. But I bore it. "There is no escape from loneliness and separation...." I told myself often. "Wife, child, brothers, parents, friends.... We come together only to go apart again. It is one continuous movement. They move away from us as we move away from them. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle and misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. My mother got away from her parents, my sisters from our house, I and my brother away from each other, my wife was torn away from me, my daughter is going away with my mother, my father has gone away from his father, my earliest friends - where are they? They scatter apart like the droplets of a waterspray. The law of life. No sense in battling against it...." Thus I reconciled myself to this separation with less struggle than before.”
― R.K. Narayan, The English Teacher

“The difference between a simpleton and an intelligent man, according to the man who is convinced that he is of the latter category, is that the former wholeheartedly accepts all things that he sees and hears while the latter never admits anything except after a most searching scrutiny. He imagines his intelligence to be a sieve of closely woven mesh through which nothing but the finest can pass. ”
― R. K. Narayan

“We always question the bonafides of the man who tells us unpleasant facts.”
― R. K. Narayan

“Friendship was another illusion like love, though it did not reach the same mad heights. People pretended that they were friends, when the fact was they were brought together by force of circumstances.”
― R.K. Narayan, The Bachelor of Arts

“Death and its associates, after the initial shock, produce callousness.”
― R. K. Narayan

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“My daddy said, that the first time you fall in love, it changes you forever and no matter how hard you try, that feeling just never goes away.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
― Milan Kundera

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“My sorrow is my castle.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.
Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love.
So if you love a flower, let it be.
Love is not about possession.
Love is about appreciation.”
― Osho

“Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories and Poems

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Nietzsche

“The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“A lot of you cared, just not enough.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.”
― Susanna Kaysen

“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