Kadri's favorite quotes

"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."
— Vladimir Nabokov

tags: reading

11 people liked it

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
— Dorothy Parker

tags: author, book, humorist, poet, wit

500 people liked it

"I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things."
— Dorothy Parker

43 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

7,324 people liked it

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading

2,595 people liked it

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: truth

1,488 people liked it

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

tags: intelligence, quotation, wit

574 people liked it

"All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

43 people liked it

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: depressing

73 people liked it

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

38 people liked it

"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

24 people liked it

"We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)

8 people liked it

"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

tags: fitzgerald

38 people liked it

"I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. "
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

34 people liked it

"The higher the buildings, the lower the morals."
— Noel Coward

tags: architecture, buildings, cities, morality, skyscrapers

7 people liked it

"Warm-hearted! I should think he has to wear asbestos vests!"
— P.G. Wodehouse (The Inimitable Jeeves)

tags: humor

11 people liked it

"If he had a mind, there was something on it."
— P.G. Wodehouse

20 people liked it

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

tags: punctuality

35 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)

22 people liked it

"Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."
— Evelyn Waugh

4 people liked it

"I can't bare you when you're not amusing."
— Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies)

tags: humor

4 people liked it

"There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair."
— Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies)

tags: despair, evil, world

10 people liked it

"All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day."
— Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies)

tags: humor, sex

4 people liked it

"We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them."
— Evelyn Waugh

9 people liked it

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation."
— H.H. Munro

6 people liked it

"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: insanity

78 people liked it

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard

28 people liked it

"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36 people liked it

"It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to
do, that makes life blessed."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10 people liked it

"'Know thyself'? If I knew myself, I'd run away!"
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: humor, insightful

18 people liked it

"The past is never where you think you left it."
— Katherine Anne Porter

tags: past

7 people liked it

"I get so tired of moral bookkeeping."
— Katherine Anne Porter

5 people liked it

"“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. "
— Jean Rhys

20 people liked it

"Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home."
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

6 people liked it

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham

tags: writing

92 people liked it

"Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad."
— W. Somerset Maugham

2 people liked it

"Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth."
— Vladimir Nabokov

44 people liked it

"Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

tags: life

39 people liked it

"We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

25 people liked it

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"
— Vladimir Nabokov

31 people liked it

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)

tags: reread

20 people liked it

"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

"There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius."
— Vladimir Nabokov

12 people liked it

"…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul. "
— Nabokov Vladimir. (Lolita. Mashenka. Zaschita Luzhina.)

9 people liked it

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited)

tags: carpet, magic, time

19 people liked it

"She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

tags: characterization

11 people liked it

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

tags: writers, writing

196 people liked it

"It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!"
— Thomas Mann (Death in Venice)

5 people liked it

"He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer."
— Thomas Mann

9 people liked it

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
— Thomas Mann

7 people liked it

Kadri's quotes

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