Luke Alexander > Luke's Quotes

“If your kid needs a role model and you ain't it, you're both fucked.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.”
― Socrates

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Nietzsche

“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I don't know for sure what ever became of Hatsumomo. A few years after the war, I heard she was making a living as a prostitute in the Miyagawa-cho district. She couldn't have been there long, because on the night I heard it, a man at the same party swore that if Hatsumomo was a prostitute, he would find her and give her some business of his own. He did go looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Over the years, she probably succeeded in drinking herself to death. She certainly wouldn't have been the first geisha to do it.

In just the way that a man can grow accustomed to a bad leg, we'd all grown accustomed to having Hatsumomo in our okiya. I don't think we quite understood all the ways her presence had afflicted us until long after she'd left, when things that we hadn't realized were ailing slowly began to heal. Even when Hatsumomo had been doing nothing more than sleeping in her room, the maids had known she was there, and that during the course of the day she would abuse them. They'd lived with the kind of tension you feel if you walk across a frozen pond whose ice might break at any moment. And as for Pumpkin, I think she'd grown to be dependent on her older sister and felt strangely lost without her.

I'd already become the okiya's principal asset, but even I took some time to weed out all the peculiar habits that had taken root because of Hatsumomo. Every time a man looked at me strangely, I found myself wondering if he'd heard something unkind about me from her, even long after she was gone. Whenever I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the okiya, I still kept my eyes lowered for fear that Hatsumomo would be waiting there on the landing, eager for someone to
abuse. I can't tell you how many times I reached that last step and looked up suddenly with the realization that there was no Hatsumomo, and there never would be again. I knew she was gone, and yet the very emptiness of the hall seemed to suggest something of her presence. Even now, as an older woman, I sometimes lift the brocade cover on the mirror of my makeup stand, and have the briefest flicker of a thought that I may find her there in the glass, smirking at me.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
― Aristotle

“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
― Franz Kafka

“It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.”
― Confucius

“I don't do drugs. I am drugs.”
― Salvador Dali

“If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Those who can't do, teach. And those who can't teach, teach gym.”
― Woody Allen, Annie Hall: Screenplay

“I HIDE myself within my flower
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
And angels know the rest.

I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness...”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In a society where you are taught to love everything, what value does that place on love?”
― Marilyn Manson

“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”
― Stephen King

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.”
― Socrates

“I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House.”
― Bill Hicks

“The ignorant man is an ox. He grows in size, not in wisdom.”
― Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
― Albert Einstein

“When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds & then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”
― Arundhati Roy