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To know you exist you need an echo. We are absolutely fascinated with the whole idea of remembering and recording.

"The fool who persists in his folly will become wise."

He saw in his son an amiable irresponsible fool. He compared Edwin at sixteen with himself at the same age. Edwin had never had a care, never suffered a privation, never been forced to think for himself. (Darius might more justly have put it—never been allowed to think for himself.) Edwin had lived in cotton-wool, and knew less of the world than his father had known at half his years; much less.

We can’t help ourselves; we’ve got to talk. Human beings are chatterboxes. When we have something on our minds, we have to talk about it, even if we can’t say what we mean.

😁🙃🧐🙂

She was a woman of terrific vitality. Her dead sister had been nothing in comparison with her. She had a glorious digestion, and was the envy of her brother-in-law—who suffered much from biliousness—because she could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in large quantities. Further, she had independent means, and no children to cause anxieties.

This was Darius’s last day on a pot-bank. The next morning he and his went in procession to the Bastille, as the place was called. His father, having been too prominent and too independent in a strike, had been black-listed by every manufacturer in the district; and Darius, though nine, could not keep the family.

And now his education was finished. It had cost his father twenty-eight shillings a term, or four guineas a year, and no trouble. In younger days his father had spent more money and far more personal attention on the upbringing of a dog. His father had enjoyed success with dogs through treating them as individuals. But it had not happened to him, nor to anybody in authority, to treat Edwin as an individual.

as for philosophy, he had not the slightest conception of what it meant. He imagined that a philosopher was one who made the best of a bad job, and he had never heard the word used in any other sense. He had great potential intellectual curiosity, but nobody had thought to stimulate it by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been trying to systematise the mysteries for quite 25 centuries

I have never been happier than in unhappiness. Happiness is not joy, and it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realization of one's secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence.

At first I had not recognised him. Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years older. I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the
returned traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered landmarks. Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him. The magic of his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth reappeared.

Why had I been born with a vein of overweening honesty in me? Why should I have sacrificed everything to the pride of my conscience, seeing that consciences were the product of education merely? Useless to try to answer the unanswerable! What is, is. And circumstances are always at the mercy of character.

I had a conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man. But I forgave him. Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.

The voice of this spirit says that it has lost
every illusion about life, and that life seems only the more beautiful. It says that activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but
another form of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but another form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. It says there is no end, only a means;

The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if they were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they should fall off. It was not so with Diaz. When Diaz played you experienced the pure emotions caused by the unblurred contemplation of that beauty which the great masters had created, and which Diaz had tinted with the rare dyes of his personality. You forgot all but beauty.

Before entering the office, he read one of the humorous advertisements Francine had put up on the wall to amuse people and remind them of something they so easily forgot: that you don't have to be serious all the time.
Here is the text of the sign Dwayne read:
You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it certainly helps.

He did not know that human beings could be dropped dead by a single idea as easily as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity on Earth to twisted ideas.

I attract crazy people and animals.

Am I meant to be a king or just a pig?

I've been predicted many things: that I'll learn to dance, that I'll get married. Let's see. I can't quite believe it.

Atrag nebunii și animalele.

Sunt menit să fiu rege sau doar un porc?

Mi s-au prezis multe lucruri: că voi învăța să dansez, că mă voi însura. Să vedem. Nu prea-mi vine să cred.

The children learned these new games, but they forgot something else, something much more valuable: they forgot how to have fun, how to be fascinated, and above all, they forgot how to dream.
Little by little, the children came to look like miniature timesavers. Sullen, bored, and hostile, they did what they were told, and when they were occasionally left to themselves, they couldn't think of anything to do.

...That said, isn't it much nicer to be rich and famous?

It is, answered Gigi chokingly.

Well there you go! So leave us out of your games and just keep telling the people the things they want to hear!

How can I do that now that I know the truth? asked Gigi, straining himself to eke out these words.

"Don't even bother" he said. "You can't do it to us. You can't get inside."

Momo didn't relent.
"Doesn't anybody love you?" she asked in a whisper.

The gray man began to writhe, and quite suddenly, he sank into himself a little. Thus, in an even grayer voice, he answered:

There is a well known yet unspoken secret in this world.
Everyone is in on it and everyone knows what it is, but very few people ever think about it. Most people just take it for granted without wondering the slightest bit about it. The secret is time .
We have calendars and clocks to measure time, but they mean little: everyone knows a single hour can seem like an eternity or pass in a flash.

What difference does it make if what I say is or isn't written down in some old book? Who's to say that the stories in the old books aren't just as invented as mine, and people just don't remember anymore? What do 'true' and 'not true' mean anyway? Who can really know what happened here one or even two thousand years ago? Do you happen to know?

In this opinion, all the misfortune in the world came from the many lies -- the deliberate ones but also the accidental ones that were born of haste or imprecision.

Some things simply take time, and time was the only thing that Momo had in abundance.

She openly revelled in her charms; she openly made the most of them. She did not attempt to disguise her wish to please, to flatter, to intoxicate. Her eyes said nothing about screaming for help. Her eyes said: 'I'm a woman; you're a man. How jolly!' Her eyes said: 'I was born to do what I'm doing now.' Her eyes said: 'Touch me—and we shall see'.

That same evening, in the privacy of his study, he eagerly read How to become a Successful Novelist. It disappointed him; nay, it desolated him. He was shocked to discover that he had done nothing that a man must do who wishes to be a successful novelist.

Women! Wine! Wealth! Joy! Life itself! He was swept off his feet by a sudden and tremendous impulse.

Înțeleg totul și adevărul e că nici eu nu sunt un bun scriitor de scrisori: Dar suntem, mai mult sau mai puțin, asemănători când vine vorba de scris scrisori: conștiincioși în momentele critice și binedispuși atunci când trebuie să ridicăm moralul.

Știu ce treabă murdară este școala. Dar să dezvolți obiceiul de a nu scrie deloc e un obicei prost, când deja școala consumă mare parte din timpul cetățenilor, iar bătrânul va vede foarte rar.