Kurt Fox > Kurt's Quotes

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
― Oscar Wilde

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“it is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses
of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“Never slow down, never look back, live each day with adolescent verve and spunk and curiosity and playfulness. If you think you’re still a young pup, then maybe you are, no matter what the calendar says.”
― John Grogan, Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog

“It is the habit of our species to despoil all we touch. Yet few see it so.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“How easy it was to give out morsels of wise counsel, and yet how hard to act on them.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Better be without sense than misapply it as you do. ”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it... It is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals.— Will you have it?”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it’s not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Fashion is an imposition, a rein on freedom.”
― Golda Meir

“And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Shadows thrown by a single candle flame often can be more frightening than total darkness.”
― Neil Abramson, Unsaid

“..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being