Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“But even more than her diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully cataloged every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks.
"You write down your criticisms, do you?"
"I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all."
"But what good does it do?"
"None at all."
"A waste of effort."
"A complete waste of effort," she answered brightly, as though the admission meant little to her. She gazed solemnly at Shimamura, however.
A complete waste of effort. For some reason Shimamura wanted to stress the point. But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.”
― Robert Graves

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”
― Robert Graves

“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr.

“To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.”
― Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly. ”
― Boris Vian

“Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.”
― Richard Yates, A Good School

“You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“...[A]nything worth dying for ... is certainly worth living for.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“my heart has more rooms in it than a whore house”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.”
― Dylan Thomas

“An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do.”
― Dylan Thomas

“I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.”
― Dylan Thomas

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

“Clown in the Moon"

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.”
― Dylan Thomas, The Poems of Dylan Thomas

“In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.”
― Dylan Thomas

“Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
"Poem on His Birthday”
― Dylan Thomas