Benjamim Franco > Benjamim's Quotes

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Philosophy is transcendental homelessness; it is the urge to be at home everywhere”
― György Lukács

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“The future will be better tomorrow.”
― Dan Quayle

“Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“Yes, I'm paranoid — but am I paranoid enough?”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work. ”
― William Faulkner

“My mother is a fish.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
― william faulkner

“A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once. ”
― William Faulkner

“You know that if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.”
― William Faulkner

“History is not was, it is.”
― Faulkner, William

“Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Leopard

“Having money isn't everything, not having it is.”
― Kanye West

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Aflição de ser água em meio à terra
E ter a face conturbada e móvel
E a um só tempo múltipla e imóvel

Não saber se se ausenta ou se te espera.
Aflição de te amar, se te comove
E sendo água, amor, querer terra.”
― Hilda Hilst, Cantares

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.”
― Stendhal

“Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...I am Pagliacci.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen