Zelkami > Zelkami's Quotes

“Upward, not Northward”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“I enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy.  I had no occasion of bribing, flattering, or pimping, to procure the favour of any great man, or of his minion; I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression: here was neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire: here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos; no leaders, or followers, of party and faction; no encouragers to vice, by seducement or examples; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics; no pride, vanity, or affectation; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes; no ranting, lewd, expensive wives; no stupid, proud pedants; no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions; no scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, judges, or dancing-masters.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking. ”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Where the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“You're not seeing happiness. You're seeing social awkwardness. A mild blindness to the normal range of social cues. You like me because I'm weird. And you like that because you think you're weird. And you are. In a good way. You know what a homotopy equivalence is, and you don't need to know that. No one needs to know that. Face it. That's weird!"

I drank my tea.

"I don't know what a homotopy equivalence is." Sam said.

"Neither do I. But you know what I mean.”
― Percival Everett, Dr. No

“It is one thing be be infuriated by a huge, square, uncut block of steel, another to be consternated by a stuffed ram with a tire around it. Neither frustration has anything to do with that which comes from looking at a dead human hand with an ornamental hat pin sticking through it. Before such monstrosities, criticism flies. How can one say that they are good or not good? Yet one does. One can blindly intuit what the artist feels, and one can cry out -if only to see that it is true- "You fool! Fool! The pin should be longer!”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“Why do we conceive the desire to give expression to things that cannot be said—and sometimes succeed? Such success is a phenomenon that occurs when a subtle arrangement of words excites the reader’s imagination to an extreme degree; at that moment, author and reader become accomplices in a crime of the imagination. And when their complicity gives rise to a work of literature—that “thing that is not a thing”— people call it “creation” and inquire no further.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
― Toni Morrison

“Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don't?”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
― Mark Twain

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”
― Robert E. Howard

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

“Let us cultivate our garden.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“True art imitates nature's total process: endless blind experiment (fish that climb tress, hands with nine fingers, shifts in and out of tonality) and then ruthless selectivity-the artist's sober judgements, like a lion's, of what can be killed, what is better left alone, such as (for the lion) rhinos and certain nasty snakes. Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art's morality.”
― John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

“I would prefer not to.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“It's incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing but the meaning need not, and does not, confine itself to that intention.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“When a boy… discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“The world demands that you introduce yourself twice, first as you are, and second as you are told to be.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“We need to stop excusing mediocre and downright pernicious art, stop 'taking it for what it’s worth' as we take our fast foods, our overpriced cars that are no good, the overpriced houses we spend all our lives fixing, our television programs, our schools thrown up like barricades in the way of young minds, our brainless fat religions, our poisonous air, our incredible cult of sports, and our ritual of fornicating with all pretty or even horse-faced strangers. We would not put up with a debauched king, but in a democracy all of us are kings, and we praise debauchery as pluralism. This book is of course no condemnation of pluralism; but it is true that art is in one sense fascistic: it claims, on good authority, that some things are healthy for individuals and society and some things are not.”
― John Champlin Gardner, On Moral Fiction