SLT > SLT's Quotes

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”
― Alain De Botton, On Love

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”
― Alain de Botton

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“There are no good girls gone wrong - just bad girls found out.”
― Mae West

“Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.

One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way.”
― Nick Flynn, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.”
― Anthony Powell

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.”
― Herman Koch, The Dinner

“Happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn't have to be validated. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Herman Koch

“Though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes so by chance.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on.”
― Rod Serling

“Every once in a while you come across a novel that reminds you why you think you enjoy reading in the first place.”
― Graham Parke

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“What fresh hell is this?”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Do you love me, Westley? Is that it?’
He couldn’t believe it. ‘Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches. If your love were—‘
‘I don’t understand the first one yet,’ Buttercup interrupted. She was starting to get very excited now. ‘Let me get this straight. Are you saying my love is the size of a grain of sand and yours is this other thing? Images just confuse me so—is this universal business of yours bigger than my sand? Help me, Westley. I have the feeling we’re on the verge of something just terribly important.’
‘I have stayed these years in my hovel because of you. I have taught myself languages because of you. I have made my body strong because I thought you might be pleased by a strong body. I have lived my life with only the prayer that some sudden dawn you might glance in my direction. I have not known a moment in years when the sight of you did not send my heart careening against my rib cage. I have not known a night when your visage did not accompany me to sleep. There has not been a morning when you did not flutter behind my waking eyelids….Is any of this getting through to you, Buttercup, or do you want me to go on for a while?’
‘Never stop.’
‘There has not been—‘
‘If you’re teasing me, Westley, I’m just going to kill you.’
‘How can you even dream I might be teasing?’
‘Well, you haven’t once said you loved me.’
‘That’s all you need? Easy. I love you. Okay? Want it louder? I love you. Spell it out, should I? I ell-oh-vee-ee why-oh-you. Want it backward? You love I.’
‘You are teasing now; aren’t you?’
‘A little maybe; I’ve been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn’t listen. Every time you said ‘Farm boy do this’ you thought I was answering ‘As you wish’ but that’s only because you were hearing wrong. ‘I love you’ was what it was, but you never heard, and you never heard.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest