Zach C > Zach's Quotes

“My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!”
― John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

“They lived and laughed and loved and left.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“When I am at my work each day
In the fields so fresh and green
I often think of riches and the way things might have been
But believe me when I tell you when I get home each day
I'm as happy as a sandboy with my wee cup of tay”
― Patrick McCabe, The Dead School

“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“If you fear thunder, let yourself be afraid", instructs a Zen proverb. So, obedient and good pupil, welcome to fear-”
― Rodrigo Fresán, The Invented Part

“People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient”
― Marilynne Robinson

“In the end, just three things matter:

How well we have lived
How well we have loved
How well we have learned to let go”
― Jack Kornfield

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems

“A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“There is no will-o-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act”
― John Barth, The Floating Opera

“To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

“Understanding,' in all honesty, is a word pregnant with difficulties, but also with hope.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

“Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”
― Bob Dylan

“Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest