Loquacious > Loquacious's Quotes

“time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales

“It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“No, not death. We have chosen life eternal, the resurrection of the...'
'That is a story to tell children. The truth is that for thousands of years we looked to what was living. Now you look to what is dead, you worship a dead man and tell one another that this world is not for us, while the next is all that matters. Only there is no next world.”
― Gore Vidal

“Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where Saturday Evening Post fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas.”
― Tom Robbins

“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning roads, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indetations, scrolls.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“...it is perhaps one's own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.”
― George Orwell, Burmese Days

“The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, "But it's been done a hundred times before!"--as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“In a voice that sounds the way a can of cheap dog food would sound if a can of cheap dog food could speak, he tells you you are looking well.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas