Matthew > Matthew's Quotes

“The really inspired person is never inspired: he's always inspired: he doesn't go looking for inspiration and he doesn't get up in arms about artistic technique.”
― Raymond Queneau, Odile

“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

“This girl has the spark of life. This is my primary filter for new friends (girl- and otherwise) and the highest compliment I can pay. I've tried many times to figure out exactly what ignites it -- what cocktail of characteristics come together in the cold, dark cosmos to form a star. I know it's mostly in the face -- not just the eyes, but the brow, the cheeks, the mouth, and the micromuscles that connect them all.

Kat's micromuscles are very attractive.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“There is no such thing as "Just a cat.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”
― Cornel West

“We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye