J. N. > J. N.'s Quotes

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

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where -' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
'- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.
'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
― Roald Dahl

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“DON'T GIVE TO THE WINTER RELIEF FUND!”
― Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone

“The further one goes, the less one knows.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Fear never shows up and the party ends early.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“And it is such a pleasure, my dear, such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right.”
― Roald Dahl, The Landlady

“. . . it will have helped us to feel that we have behaved decently till the end . . . we all acted alone, we were all caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn't mean that we are alone, Quangel, or that our deaths will be in vain.”
― Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone

“He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
― Huxley Aldous

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III