Karen > Karen's Quotes

“When people are finding meaning in things - beware.”
― Edward Gorey, Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Nothing on earth can make up for the loss of one who has loved you.”
― Selma Lagerlöf

“When you set sail for Ithaca,
wish for the road to be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.”
― C.P. Cavafy

“A day of silence can be a pilgrimage in itself.”
― حافظ, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy

“God save us from people who mean well.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“We can win.
We can lose.
We can fall down.
We can get up and do it over again, better.
We can go for it as if we have nothing to lose, knowing we have everything to lose.
...
We can tear up a dance floor and put it all back together again.
We can talk loud in public.
We can be fierce.
We can be small.
We can be mighty.
We can be too much.
We can be just enough, just in time.
We can.
We have to.”
― Bill T. Jones, Last Night on Earth

“Sincerity is all that counts -- it’s a widespread modern heresy. Think again. Bolsheviks are sincere. Fascists are sincere. Lunatics are sincere. People who believe the earth is flat are sincere. They can’t all be right.”
― Tom Driberg

“No friendship is an accident. ”
― O. Henry, Heart of the West

“When one opens a book, one should also open one's mind.”
― Adriano Bulla

“I cannot live without books.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer. ”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?”
― Shirley Graham Du Bois

“She was an extremely attractive woman if you liked the type, which could best be described as homicidal schizophrenic paranoiac with kittenish overtones.”
― Robert Sheckley, The 10th Victim

“Life was short and brutal; so were the neighbors.”
― Robert Dunbar, Wood

“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions, when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.”
― Anthony Burgess

“I see dull people,” she yawned.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”
― Kathleen Norris

“Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.”
― Franz Kafka

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Every love story is a ghost story.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“I think I am becoming my own ghost.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“Tall, aren't you?
I didn't mean to be.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire