Zuby > Zuby's Quotes

“Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Alabaster was never mad; he’s just learned so much that would have driven a lesser soul to gibbering, that sometimes it shows. Letting out some of that accumulated horror by occasionally sounding like a frothing maniac is how he copes. It’s also how he warns you, you know now, that he’s about to destroy some additional measure of your naivete. Nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are).”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Her heart breaks in this moment. Another small, quiet tragedy, amid so many others.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Complaining about nothing doesn't seem like coping to you, but okay.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Besides, like a man who knows he is dying, he felt a need to be equally tender to all.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea / Temple of the Golden Pavilion / Confessions of a Mask

“At thirteen, Noboru was convinced of his own genius (each of the others in the gang felt the same way) and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man's only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too: that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin. Therefore, his own father's death, when he was eight, had been a happy incident, something to be proud of.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else.

Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we
imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“It was if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“For goodness sake,' they'll cry, 'you cannot argue against it--two times two is four! Nature doesn't consult you; it doesn't give a damn for your wishes or whether its laws please or do not please you. You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall. ...' And so on and so forth. Good God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don't like these laws, including the 'two times two is four'? Of course, I cannot break through this wall with my head if I don't have the strength to break through it, but neither will I accept it simply because I face a stone wall and am not strong enough.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From The Underground

“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. ”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray