Plch > Plch's Quotes

“Don't Panic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.”
― Alison Lurie

“People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.”
― Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
― Mark Twain

“My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”
― Oliver Sacks

“Question your tea spoons.”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.”
― Primo Levi

“If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods—that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection—then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being—the well-being of all of us on the planet—depends on the education of our descendants.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“A woman has to be intelligent, have charm, a sense of humor, and be kind. It's the same qualities I require from a man.”
― Catherine Deneuve

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. ”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned”
― Antonio Gramsci

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

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

“«Quanto pesa una lacrima?»
«Secondo: la lacrima di un bambino capriccioso pesa meno del vento, quella di un bambino affamato pesa più di tutta la terra.»”
― Gianni Rodari, Il libro degli errori

“Sections in the bookstore

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Diventerò grande, accadranno tante cose e toccherò il fondo molte volte. Soffrirò molte volte e molte volte mi rimetterò in piedi. Non mi lascerò sconfiggere.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“Give the children love, more love and still more love – and the common sense will come by itself.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

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

“But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.”
― Anne Bronte

“Strange department, this. Their motto was: "The comprehension of Infinity requires infinite time." I did not argue with that, but then they derived an unexpected conclusion from it: Therefore work or not, it´s all the same."
In the interests of not increasing the entropy of the universe, they did not work.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Понедельник начинается в субботу