Demetrelli > Demetrelli's Quotes

“This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”
― Oscar Wilde

“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“Samuel: What's a misanthrope?
Two Bob: A misanthrope is a bugger who hates every other bugger.
Samuel: Are we misanthropes?
Arthur: Lord no! We're family. ”
― Nick Cave

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“Όπως βλέπεις, Άρεν, μια πράξη δεν είναι, όπως συχνά νομίζουν οι νέοι, σαν μια πέτρα, που κάποιος σηκώνει και πετάει, και πετυχαίνει ή αστοχεί, κι αυτό είναι όλο. Όταν σηκώνεις αυτή την πέτρα, η γη γίνεται ελαφρότερη και το χέρι που την βαστά γίνεται βαρύτερο. Όταν την πετάς, τα κυκλώματα των άστρων ανταποκρίνονται, κι όπου χτυπήσει ή πέσει το σύμπαν μεταβάλλεται. Με κάθε πράξη διακυβεύεται η ισορροπία του συνόλου. Οι άνεμοι και οι θάλασσες, οι δυνάμεις του νερού, του εδάφους και του φωτός, τα ζώα και τα φυτά, και όλα όσα κάνουν, είναι καλά και σωστά καμωμένα. Γιατί όλα τους δρουν μέσα στο πλαίσιο της Ισορροπίας. Από τον τυφώνα και το σάλπισμα της μεγάλης φάλαινας, μέχρι την πτώση ενός ξεραμένου φύλου και το πέταγμα της σκνίπας· όλα γίνονται με γνώμονα την ισορροπία του συνόλου. Αλλά εμείς, στο βαθμό που έχουμε εξουσία πάνω στο σύμπαν και ο ένας πάνω στον άλλον, πρέπει να μαθαίνουμε να κάνουμε αυτό που το φύλλο και η φάλαινα και ο άνεμος κάνουν από τη φύση τους. Πρέπει να μαθαίνουμε να διατηρούμε την ισορροπία. Αφού διαθέτουμε ευφυΐα, δεν πρέπει να δρούμε από άγνοια. Αφού έχουμε επιλογές, δεν πρέπει να συμπεριφερόμαστε ανεύθυνα.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet