Jeff > Jeff's Quotes

“We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.”
― Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

“every night, when he didn't want to be alone, or to age or die, with that set expression he assumed which she occasionally recognized on other men's faces, the only common expression of those madmen hiding under an appearance of wisdom until the madness seizes them and hurls them desperately toward a woman's body to bury in it, without desire, everything terrifying that solitude and night reveals to them.”
― Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom

“If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking and cursing in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in mans own image; if Venus returned she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards--”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.”
― William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness

“The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I don't know what's come over this place,' Maud stated. 'However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.'
'And did the Lord suggest your sticking up your father for ten shillings?'
'No, I thought of that,' said Maud, not turning a hair.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, A World of Love

“War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein

“Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“[F]or contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation...”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life span as the measure of an interminable acheivement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?”
― Marquis de Sade, Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue

“Someone's got to do these things,' he said sullenly. 'Or else fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“With old and young great sorrow is followed by a sleepless night, and with the old great joy is as disturbing; but you, I suppose, finds happiness more natural and its rest is not disturbed by it.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still; for age will not be defied.”
― Francis Bacon, Of Empire

“All he had ever prayed for was the ability to catch outfield flies, in answer to which God had bestowed upon him a penis that was bigger than anybody else's. What kind of world came up with such idiotic bargains?”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“Lessons hide in his wrinkles. Bells ding in the oldness of eyes. Did he by, any chance, tell children that there are such monstrous things as peace and goodwill...a corrupter of youth no doubt...”
― E.E. Cummings, The Enormous Room

“These "so thats," "becauses," and "whens" were like regulations; in decided to avoid them in order not to--”
― Peter Handke, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

“But he who neither thinks for himself nor learns from others, is a failure as a man.”
― Hesiod, Works and Days and Theogony

“Give me a man who understands my moods, who brother-like, understands my grouchiness. If you will give your mind to what I say, dear friend, you will remember me one day.”
― Theognis, Elegies of Theognis: A Revised Text Based on a New Collation of the Mutininensis MS

“I think I have always liked my fellow men. Liking is a great deal safer than love. It doesn't demand victims. Who is your victim, Querry?”
― Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case

“You tell 'em, big boy; treat 'em rough.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“[W]omen are born with the obligation to obey their husbands even if they're fools.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“Martin knew nothing about America, or he would have known perfectly well that if its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.”
― Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

“When Jenny left me, betrayed me for a cripple whom she imagined to need her more, my mother said never mind, perhaps he would die and then I could have her back again.”
― B.S. Johnson, Albert Angelo