Adrian > Adrian's Quotes

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“I have learned that to be with those I like is enough”
― Walt Whitman

“I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it. People never notice anything.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.”
― Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War

“To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.”
― Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger

“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."

(Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913)”
― D.H. Lawrence, Letters

“It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake. ”
― D.H. Lawrence

“People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.”
― Andy Warhol

“It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
― Raymond Carver

“We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.”
― Maxim Gorky

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Don't fool yourself, my dear. You're much worse than a bitch. You're a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”
― D. H. Lawrence

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway