Zoe's quotes

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"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
— Vladimir Nabokov

tags: writing
41 people liked it

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

tags: writing
485 people liked it

"Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road..."
— Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)

12 people liked it

"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

tags: writing
573 people liked it

"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

"
— Joseph Heller (Catch 22)

tags: humor
24 people liked it

"Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain."
— Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

33 people liked it

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
— Sinclair Lewis

tags: fascism, freedom, politics, religion
323 people liked it

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever."
— George Orwell (1984)

tags: future
104 people liked it

"As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know."
— Carl Gustav Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

tags: childhood, psychology
16 people liked it

"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
— Mahatma Gandhi

tags: bread, food, god, humanity, hunger, poverty, religion
134 people liked it

"I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me."
— Nick Cave

tags: music, nick-cave, spin-magazine, television
5 people liked it

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
7,550 people liked it

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
— Richard Dawkins

tags: atheism, philosophy
409 people liked it

"If one were to take the Bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the Bible seriously, one must be already mad."
— Aleister Crowley

tags: anti-christian, atheism, bible, religion
94 people liked it

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

tags: mood-swings
211 people liked it

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."
— Dylan Thomas

4 people liked it

"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer -- they think they have, so they stop thinking. "
— Ken Kesey

38 people liked it

"The paranoid is never entirely mistaken."
— Sigmund Freud

16 people liked it

"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."
— Richard Dawkins

tags: dawkins, institutions, religion, richard
51 people liked it

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: corruption, dark, fighting, monsters, side, soul
366 people liked it

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."
— Evelyn Waugh

tags: punctuality
36 people liked it

"Stop thinking, and end your problems."
— Laozi

tags: thinking
37 people liked it

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
— Albert Camus

tags: humanity, life, mankind, mortality
491 people liked it

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
— George Orwell (1984)

tags: first-sentence
49 people liked it

"I talk to God but the sky is empty."
— Sylvia Plath

tags: god
101 people liked it

"My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.
"
— Dylan Thomas

3 people liked it

"You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father."
— Sigmund Freud

tags: father, murder, paricide
3 people liked it

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

tags: life
7,114 people liked it

"Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion."
— Ambrose Bierce

tags: food, religion
20 people liked it

"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

23 people liked it

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories)

tags: sin
706 people liked it

"They're so cold, these scholars!
May lightning strike their food
so that their mouths learn how
to eat fire!"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: coldness, education, elitism, higher, scholars, scholarship
12 people liked it

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, quotation, wit
587 people liked it

"Beautiful thing, the destruction of words. "
— George Orwell

tags: absurd
64 people liked it

"Is there no way out of the mind?"
— Sylvia Plath

117 people liked it

"McMurphy tied a chunk of meat to each end of a four-foot string, tossed it into the air, and sent two squawking birds wheeling off, "Till death do them part.""
— Ken Kesey

2 people liked it

"So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state."
— Sylvia Plath

tags: brainwashed, children, marriage
31 people liked it

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: belief, death, ideals, martyr, truth
768 people liked it

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman."
— Albert Camus

tags: beauty, humanity, inhumanity
98 people liked it

"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."
— Albert Camus

tags: intellectuals, intelligence, philosophy, scholars
131 people liked it

"Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

37 people liked it

"I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning."
— Aleister Crowley

24 people liked it

"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic."
— Aldous Huxley

tags: causality, error, intelligence, theories
67 people liked it

"Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect."
— Edgar Allan Poe (Complete Tales and Poems)

tags: greatness, insanity, intelligence, sanity
68 people liked it

"Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

52 people liked it

"Miracles occur,
If you dare to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's
begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent."
— Sylvia Plath

10 people liked it

"The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's."
— Mark Twain

tags: animals, dogs, heaven, inspirational, man, religion
35 people liked it

"I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

18 people liked it

"The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
— Flannery O'Connor

tags: religion
20 people liked it

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: friends, friendship, observation, writers, writing
92 people liked it

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