Bas > Bas's Quotes

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there's no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that's the source of our descent, and it doesn't start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.”
― Salman Rushdie

“If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“A man can only lead when others accept him as their leader, and he has only as much authority as his subjects give to him. All of the brilliant ideas in the world cannot save your kingdom if no one will listen to them.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.”
― Richard Yates, Cold Spring Harbor

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

(in "The Sporting Spirit", Tribune, GB, London, December 1945)”
― George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 1903-1950

“Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.
”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men