Meda Lakkh > Meda's Quotes

“He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

“They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

“One could not stand and watch very long without being philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.... Each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him, and a horrid Fate in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, all his protests, his screams were nothing to it. It did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
― Leonard Cohen

“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
― Leonard Cohen

“It is significant, I sometimes think, that the facets of nature which quicken my pulse with that awareness of both life and death are inextricably associated with the loneliness of man’s mote-like existence in the cosmos―and acceptance of man’s essential solitude on earth, or by love, or both together, for they are only different aspects of the same face.”
― August Derleth, Walden West

“There was something about him where he stood all by himself under the trees and the stars, on the edge of the streetlight’s glow in the darkness, that was symbolic of many men and women, not alone in this Sac Prairie, but in all the Sac Prairies of the world, something which spoke, out of that pathetic, ludicrous figure, of the spiritual isolation of so many people, something which made the thoughtful onlooker to wonder what thin line divided him from that other, knowing perhaps that the distance of chance or Providence was less great than the few steps separating one from the other in that darkness.”
― August Derleth, Walden West

“I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life”
― Diane di Prima

“It is still news to her that passion
could steer her wrong
though she went down, a thousand times
strung out
across railroad tracks, off bridges
under cars, or stiff
glass bottle still in hand, hair soft
on greasy pillows, still it is
news she cannot follow love (his
burning footsteps in blue crystal
snow) & still
come out all right.”
― Diane Di Prima

“However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Inspector General

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“In love, one and one are one.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“Question your tea spoons.”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.”
― Louise Gluck

“Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.”
― Louise Glück

“I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or perhaps, once one begins,
there are only endings.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“I don't remember
lighting this cigarette
and I don't remember
if I'm here alone
or waiting for someone.”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

“If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.”
― Leonard Cohen