Lannie > Lannie's Quotes

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.”
― Sherwood Anderson

“Only the learned read old books, and... now... they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. ...[G]reat scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk..." [for] ...when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. ... [Therefore, even though] learning makes a free commerce between the ages... every generation [is cut] off from all others... [and] ...characteristic errors of one [are not] corrected by the characteristic truths of another.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“I have been told I've got a darkish personality. A few times."
Takahashi swings his trombone case from his right shoulder to his left. Then he says, "It's not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There's shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort. I don't think you have a particularly dark character.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell

“Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“every human culture is created by fear,”
― László Krasznahorkai, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming

“empirical evidence is precisely that which is sacred in so-called scientific thought, and by these means—there’s no point in denying it—we can go far, but at the same time, by following this method, we greatly distance ourselves from the problem, because it’s so, but so manifest that empirical proof itself is something that no one has ever heretofore truly dealt with, namely, no one has ever wished genuinely to confront the deeply problematic nature of empirical verification as such, because whoever did this went mad, or appeared to be a pure dilettante,”
― László Krasznahorkai, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming

“...we must never lose sight of that gaze with which we look at things.”
― László Krasznahorkai, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming

“When the flood cometh it sweepeth away grain as well as chaff.”
― Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

“Irimiás: God is not made manifest in language, you dope. He's not manifest in anything. He doesn't exist... God was a mistake. I've long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There's no sense or meaning in anything. It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of delay. There's no escaping that, stupid.”
― László Krasznahorkai, Satantango

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“A loss that can be repaired by money is not of such very great importance.”
― Anonymous, The Arabian Nights

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“There's something ugly about the flawless.”
― Dennis Lehane, Sacred

“I've had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.”
― James Tiptree Jr.

“Passing in any crowd are secret people whose hidden response to beauty is the desire to tear it into bleeding meat.”
― James Tiptree Jr.

“My flesh looked like it wasn't trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.”
― Charles Bukowski, Pulp: Charles Bukowski's Final Hardboiled Noir Comedy – Lady Death, Aliens, and the Absurd

“Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.”
― George Carlin

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Why should things be easy to understand?”
― Thomas Pynchon

“What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Signs and Symbols

“Yet we ought to kill someone!' said the gentleman, immediately reverting to his former subject. 'I have been quite out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell