Jonathan Herbrecht > Jonathan's Quotes

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse

“Death is unstoppable. One must face it as a fact of life”
― D. Aswini, Saffron - The Blood Swan

“There are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“Life has no remote....get up and change it yourself!”
― Mark A. Cooper, Operation Einstein

“Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but fear too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions."

"Nice little saloon, isn't it" I said, as if noticing it for the first time.

"At noon I gave no orders for change of course, and the mates whiskers grew much concerned and seemed to be offering themselves to my unduly notice.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You

“People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“To Priests, Soldiers, Judges- to men who rear, lead or govern men I dedicate these pages of murder and blood.”
― Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden

“There are dead girls to mourn, and living girls who will struggle for years to adjust to life outside the Garden, if they even can. He still counts this as a good day.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“For after all, if the lives of most men are examined in detail, it will be found that they have been experts of immense stature in some unremunerated field, the strategy and theory of some sport or the practice of some craft, have had an exhaustive knowledge of old circus posters or eighteenth-century inn signs or the mathematics of comets; and nothing so distinguished Professor Peacock from the ruck of men as his air of amateurishness.”
― Gene Wolfe, Peace

“He was a rich man—richer, I think, than Mr. Macafee—and like most rich men he had nothing distinctive about him, the money having assumed for him the task of self-expression that, in poorer men, is assumed by the personality;”
― Gene Wolfe, Peace

“(Have you never thought as you read that months may lie between any pair of words?)”
― Gene Wolfe, Peace

“Lois had gone out of my life (I should say that she had left my future—I could never eradicate her from my past, no matter how hard I tried)”
― Gene Wolfe, Peace

“I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know.”
― Bill Watterson, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

“But we must come to realise that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot: Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
― Mark Twain

“The thing about smart mother fuckers is that sometimes, they sound like crazy mother fuckers to stupid mother fuckers...”
― Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 9: Here We Remain

“We all broken, I said. Some broken folk do whatever they can not to break other folk. If we're gone be broken, I wonder if we can be those kind of broken folk from now on. I think it's possible to be broken and ask for help without breaking other people.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“I will not misdirect or manipulate human beings...especially those human beings who love me enough to risk being misdirected or manipulated. I will not misdirect or manipulate myself...I will not say I am sorry when I am resentful. I will not give my blessings away. I will love myself enough to be honest when I fail at loving.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, "You're trespassing and I give you no authority to steal my joy, my faith or my hope.”
― Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

“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

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.”
― Terry Pratchett

“The water looks really nice like this,” Allen says.
“Yeah,” you say, looking like you are looking at the water, or, at least, how you imagine you would look looking like you are looking at the water.
You look at the water and don’t say anything.
Then you peek, just for a second, to look at Allen.
Allen isn’t even looking at the water.
He’s crying about something.”
― Mike Kleine, Mastodon Farm