Benn > Benn's Quotes

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually dirty kitchen, and 5 times out of 9 I'll show you an exceptional man." "show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference.
George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha: Amen.”
― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.”
― Paulo Coelho, Brida

“Out of all the things you could not have there were some that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

“Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

“The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of thier own at horrible speed. I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate thier pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war indeed! In war all solderies are lousy, at the least when it is warm enough. The men that fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.”
― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.”
― Khalil Gibran

“Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking; You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits.”
― Cindy Ross

“Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.”
― Charles Dickens

“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“He always spoke of himself to me “as an unskilled laborer in the vineyard of the Lord, with regard to outlook as well as wages.”
― Heinrich Böll, The Clown

“Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that mazeis itself an enslavement for it voids every alternate and binds one ever more tightly in to the constraints that make a life.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“Love makes men foolish. I speak as a victim myself. We are taken out of our own care and then it remains to be seen only if fate will show to us some share of mercy. Or little. Or none.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf