Zach C > Zach's Quotes

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“And I shall watch the ferry boats, and they'll get high,
On a bluer ocean against tomorrow's sky,
And I will never grow so old again,
And I will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain.

- Sweet Thing”
― Van Morrison, Lit Up Inside: Selected Lyrics

“One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“The traveler who's just climbed a steep mountain sits down at the top, and finds perfect pleasure in resting. Would he be as happy, if he were forced to do nothing but rest?”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

“Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”
― David Foster Wallace, Oblivion

“One’s self-image not only encompasses the person you are but also the person you wanted to be, could be or once had been.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“And she moves among the sparrows. And she floats upon the breeze. She moves among the flowers. She moves something deep inside of me”
― Nick Cave

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow - the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos completos

“Don't be fooled by your own wisdom”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
― Walt Whitman

“These are the days that must happen to you.”
― Walt Whitman

“I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”
― T.S. Eliot

“Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets