Larry > Larry's Quotes

“They threw me off the haytruck about noon.”
― James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. ”
― W.C. Fields

“Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up.”
― Miles Davis

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“Cachet — isn’t that like panache, but sitting down?”
― Warren Zevon

“There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness;....and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way where the imprisoned splendor may escape, then in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.”
― Robert Browning

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning -- already gone --
thus should one regard one's self.”
― Ikkyu

“First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?”
― Thomas Merton

“Wherever you go, there you are.”
― Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

“The square root of I is I.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”
― Oscar Wilde

“But now, in the final hours, even hope had vanished. Yet he could smile. At a point without hope he had found contentment. He knew he had tried and there was nothing to be sorry for. And this was complete victory, because it was a victory over himself.”
― Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man

“Résumé
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”
― Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope