Haris Vuk > Haris's Quotes

“It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate's so easy compared.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
― Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

“She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said – and he included himself in this statement – was unimportant.”
― Rachel Cusk, Kudos

“A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.”
― Rachel Cusk, Kudos

“It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.”
― Rachel Cusk, Kudos

“As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you?”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”
― John Williams, Stoner

“He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Whenever I’m worried about anything,” said this guy Ben, “I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important.” I acknowledged that this was a great comfort. Svetlana”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“There's a certain type of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“A problem isn't finished just because you've found the right answer.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words "Dear God, life is hell." Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, "Fathers and teachers, I ponder, 'What is Hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Doing no violence to living things, not even a single one of them, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Affection comes from the company of people, misery comes from affection, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

The old bamboo is entangled, the young shoot is unattached, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

A deer goes to eat where it wants to eat, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Give up your children and your wives and your money, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Everyone wants your attention, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Two bright bangles on an arm clang, a single bangle is silent, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

A bird who has torn the net, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Fire does not return to what it has burnt, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

A tiger is not alarmed by sounds in the forest, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Cold and heat, hunger and thirst, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

With eyes cast down, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

At home anywhere, wander alone like a rhinoceros.”
― Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing

“Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev. Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita