Gora_Gu > Gora_Gu's Quotes

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me?”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“But you needn’t be worried that you will meet the same fate as Novalis’s fiancee.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are several more chapters.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“[H]e never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one's neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“La idea de ganarse la confianza ajena sin dar a cambio la suya le parecía el colmo de la sabiduría.”
― Eduardo Mendoza, La ciudad de los prodigios

“Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune...”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“We are so afraid of the idea of having to die… that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Liberal studies means..." said Mrs Chatterway, who prided herself on being an advocate of progressive education, in which role she had made a substantial contribution to the illiteracy rate in several previously good primary schools.”
― Tom Sharpe, Wilt

“Yo, señor, no soy malo, aunque no me faltarían motivos para serlo. Los mismos cueros tenemos todos los mortales al nacer y sin embargo, cuando vamos creciendo, el destino se complace en variarnos como si fuésemos de cera y en destinarnos por sendas diferentes al mismo fin: la muerte. Hay hombres a quienes se les ordena marchar por el camino de las flores, y hombres a quienes se les manda tirar por el camino de los cardos y de las chumberas. Aquéllos gozan de un mirar sereno y al aroma de su felicidad sonríen con la cara del inocente; estos otros sufren del sol violento de la llanura y arrugan el ceño como las alimañas por defenderse. Hay mucha diferencia entre adornarse las carnes con arrebol y colonia, y hacerlo con tatuajes que después nadie puede borrar ya.”
― Camilo José Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte

“La tierra por en medio se dice cuando dos se separan a dos pueblos distantes, pero, bien mirado, también se podría decir cuando entre el terreno en donde uno pisa y el otro duerme hay veinte pies de altura.”
― Camilo José Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte

“***HERE IS A SMALL FACT ***
You are going to die.


I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“*** THE CONTRADICTORY POLITICS OF ALEX STEINER ***

Point One: He was a member of the Nazi Party but he did not hate the Jews, or anyone else for that matter.

Point Two: Secretly, though, he couldn’t help feeling a percentage of relief (or worse – gladness!) when Jewish shop owners were put out of business – propaganda informed him that it was only a matter of time before a plague of Jewish tailors showed up and stole his customers.

Point Three: But did that mean they should be driven out completely?

Point Four: His family. Surely, he had to do whatever he could to support them. If that meant being in the Party, it meant being in the Party.

Point Five: Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You can't make a race horse of a pig."
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Todo eso que está inútilmente añadido a la pura necesidad, es arte.”
― Torcuato Luca de Tena, Los renglones torcidos de Dios

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“It is difficult to remain an emperor in presence of a physician, and difficult even to keep one's essential quality as man.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,' said one of the soldiers. 'In peacetime it's the other way round: one coffin and a hundred people carrying flowers.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“And here she was, an old woman now, living and hoping, keeping faith, afraid of evil, full of anxiety for the living and an equal concern for the dead; here she was, looking at the ruins of her home, admiring the spring sky without knowing that she was admiring it, wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour- camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“Respecto de la justicia, yo creo que lo justo en el fondo es lo que nos conviene.”
― Pío Baroja, El árbol de la ciencia

“It is my considered view that no one can invent fictional characters without first having made a lengthy study of people, just as it is impossible for anyone to speak a language that has not been properly mastered. Since I am not yet of an age to invent, I must make do with telling a tale.”
― Alexandre Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias

“Stand to Center meant only great shame or great honor.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Si el cántaro da en la piedra, o la piedra en el cántaro, mal para el cántaro.”
― Ramón J. Sender, Réquiem por un campesino español

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince