Odetta > Odetta's Quotes

“That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

“The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.”
― Bill Nye

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

“I was born with a reading list I will never finish.”
― Maud Casey

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.”
― They Might Be Giants

“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”
― Jacques Derrida

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.”
― Matt Groening

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“Da kiti daba Šiaulius vadin Saules miestu. Saules galietų būt' i daugiau.”
― Rimantas Kmita

“Laisve yra daryt' nesąmones.”
― Rimantas Kmita, Pietinia kronikas

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ”
― Pericles

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Silence is so accurate.”
― Mark Rothko

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze