Rui > Rui's Quotes

“The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone.”
― don delillo, White Noise

“Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

Cotsakis crushed a can of Diet Pepsi and threw it at a garbage pail.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“She is the kind of child who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt or attraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theater, sports, conversation and sex. This is a town of dry cleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. These pictures have not changed in years. The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other states. This is a town of tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“His collar pulled and his tie strained against the intrusion. He blinked. He was irresistibly aware of the oddness of moving things.”
― Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys

“He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“He found his cigar smoldering in an ashtray on the liquor cabinet and he fired it up again. The aroma gave him a sense of robust health. He smelled well-being, long life, even placid fatherhood, somewhere, in the burning leaf.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.”
― Ray Bradbury

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness — the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself that was it - he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.”
― Philip Roth, Everyman

“Leaning into the wall as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“...queira Deus que nunca se extinga a caridade para que não venha a acabar-se a pobreza...”
― José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

“[...] provavelmente a língua é que vai escolhendo os escritores de que precisa, serve-se deles para que exprimam uma parte pequena do que é, quando a língua tiver dito tudo, e calado, sempre quero ver como iremos nós viver.”
― José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“LADY BRACKNELL

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“[...] é que a sensibilidade tem recônditos tão profundos que, se por eles nos aventurarmos com ânimo de tudo examinar, há grande perigo de não sairmos de lá tão cedo.”
― José Saramago

“Cecily: Oh, yes. Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray