Arlian > Arlian's Quotes

“Although I had once pinned all my hopes on putting myself through school, believing I could thereby make something of myself, I now realized the futility of this all too clearly. No amount of struggling for an education is going to help one get ahead in this world. And what does it mean to get ahead anyway? is there any more worthless lot than the so-called great people of this world? What is so admirable about being looked up to by others? I do not live for other. What I had to achieve was my own freedom, my own satisfaction. I had to be myself.”
― Fumiko Kaneko, The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman

“It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“Hatsuyo ridiculed the movements of people like the socialists, or at best viewed them coolly. "I can't," she said, "hold a fixed philosophy about human society. What I do is gather people around me who feel like I do and live the kind of life that feels right. That is the kind of life that is most realistic and has the most meaning. One member of our group called that view "escapism", but I did not agree. I, too, believed that it was impossible to change the existing society into one that would be FOR the benefit of all; neither could I espouse any given ideal for society.”
― Fumiko Kaneko, The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman

“I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I think, therefore I doubt.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I regard marriage as a sin and propagation of children as a crime. It is my conviction also that he is a fool, and still more a sinner, who takes upon himself the yoke of marriage - a fool, because he thereby throws away his freedom, without gaining a corresponding recompense; a sinner, because he gives life to children, without being able to give them the certainty of happiness. I despise humanity in all its strata; I foresee that our posterity will be far more unhappy than we are; and should not I be a sinner, if, in spite of this insight, I should take care to leave a posterity of unhappy beings behind me? The whole of life is the greatest insanity. And if for eighty years one strives and inquiries, still one is obliged finally to confess that he has striven for nothing and has found nothing. Did we at least know why we are in this world! But to the thinker, everything is and remains a riddle; and the greatest good luck is that of being born a flathead.”
― Alexander von Humboldt

“He was another knife I could feel it. A different sort, but a knife still. I did not care. I thought: give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe