Jamie > Jamie's Quotes

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation of the Word.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.”
― Albert Einstein

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“You have to understand that in a person's life there are a few precious moments in which decisions, choices that you make now, will affect you for the rest of your life.”
― Dave Pelzer, The Lost Boy

“Even in its darkest passages, the heart is unconquerable. It is important that the body survives, but it is more meaningful that the human spirit prevails.”
― Dave Pelzer, A Child Called "It"

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
― Albert Camus

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”
― Joseph Campbell

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
― Bill Gates

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”
― Anne Frank

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.”
― Tom Robbins

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”
― Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence

“Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?”
― José Rizal, El Filibusterismo

“Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”
― Stephen King

“You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude
toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather
than allowing it to master you.”
― Brian Tracy

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.
If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman

“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
― Sir Francis Bacon