Tim Wetzel > Tim's Quotes

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“It is better to burn than to disappear.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“I am always in love.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Tis in ourselves that we are thus
or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which
our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant
nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or
distract it with many, either to have it sterile
with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the
power and corrigible authority of this lies in our
wills. If the balance of our lives had not one
scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the
blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us
to most preposterous conclusions: but we have
reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal
stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that
you call love to be a sect or scion.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place...”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“I don't want to die without any scars.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who watches the watchmen?”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird