Adam > Adam's Quotes

“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The only truth is music.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”
― Aldous Huxley

“If people lived forever—if they never got any older—if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy—do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way were doing now? I mean, we think about its everything, more or less—philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such t
hing as death, the complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies”
― George Orwell, 1984

“He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse him of having created an ugly world.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“We [Raymond and Meursault] stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”
― Murakami Haruki, Kafka on the Shore

“As in all religions, man is freed of the weight of his own life.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Mates are a waste of fucking time. They are always ready to drag you down tae their level of social, sexual and intellectual mediocrity.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Comparisons are odious.”
― Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

“Rieux knew what the old man was thinking at that moment as he wept, and he thought the same: that this world without love was like a dead world and that there always comes a time when one grows tired of prisons, work and courage, and years for the face of another human being and the wondering, affectionate heart.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“seriousness, young man, is an accident of time”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“I was lying there trying to control the fear. I did not know much about this uremic poisoning. A woman I'd known slightly in Texas had died of it after drinking a bottle of beer ever hour, night and day, for two weeks.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
― Huxley Aldous

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
― Aldous Huxley

“We were approaching the Louvre, but he paused to lean on the parapet, and we both stood there contemplating the passing boats, which dazzled us with their spotlights. ‘Look at them,’ I said, because I needed to talk about something, afraid that he might get bored and go home. ‘They only see what the spotlights show them. When they go home home, they’ll say they know Paris. Tomorrow they’ll go and see the Mona Lisa and claim they’ve visited the Louvre. But they don’t know Paris and have never really been to the Louvre. All they did was go on a boat and look at a painting, one painting, instead of looking at a whole city and trying to find out what’s happening in it, visiting the bars, going down the streets that don’t appear in any of the tourist guides, and getting lost in order to find themselves again. It’s the difference between watching a porn movie and making love.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Zahir

“Aging is not just decay, you know, its growth.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“independence came at a high price: a debt with a payment schedule of hurt and regret.”
― Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

“...you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance.”
― Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood