Conner > Conner's Quotes

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: “Death is the cooling night.” That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Imagine the spirit as a mansion. You’ll guess we don’t use many rooms. Apart from a few moments in childhood we don’t dance around it in sunlight. But there’s a traffic of things in and out, and what happens is that unwanted bulks can gather inside. Gather and gather, menacing us. Unable to shift them, we hide in ever-smaller spaces. And in our last hole, life offers a choice: to play out our demise in parallel theatres - psychosis, zealotry, religion, cancer, addiction - or to bow quietly out. But beware: life doesn’t ask these high questions when we’re confident and fresh - it waits for hopelessness.”
― D.B.C. Pierre, Lights Out in Wonderland

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
― Neal Stephenson

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
― Plato

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
― Sigmund Freud

“I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is not a significant creative possibly has real costs. We the audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology, and live in a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or end and quite literally ETERNAL. If we're the only animals who know in advance we're going to die, we're also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth. The danger is that, as entertainment's denials of the truth get even more effective and pervasive and seductive, we will eventually forget what they're denials OF. This is scary. Because it seems transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we're going to forget how to live.”
― David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not: Essays

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.”
― David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not

“to fight for each minute is to
fight for what is possible within
yourself,
so that your life and your death
will not be like
theirs.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle -”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last