Cbwinget > Cbwinget's Quotes

“Gilgamesh was called a god and a man; Enkidu was an animal and a man. It is the story of their becoming human together.”
― Herbert Mason, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“Death is a mystery and must always remain such.”
― Anonymous, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“The only men ruthless enough to fight against tyranny were themselves inclined to it.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

“When there’s no way out, you just follow the way in front of you.”
― Anonymous, Gilgamesh

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.

Or you don't.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time.

- Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell

“There's no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, not because it was an Edenic place overflowing with natural resources, but because it was so hostile to settlement that a village of any size needed careful management to survive.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

“Fear is the loneliest feeling. You can be in a throng of people, but if you're afraid, you're on your own.”
― Michelle Paver, Oath Breaker

“Evil exists in us all, Torak. Some fight it. Some feed it. That's how it's always been.”
― Michelle Paver

“I didn't tell him, I never told him. Not in a way that he believed. Not in a way that he could let in and hold on to. Everything he was to me. That he was everything.
Simon, Simon . . .
You were the sun, and I was crashing into you.
I'd wake up every morning and tell myself . . .
I'd tell myself . . .
"You live in fear! In denial!"
Simon is on the ground. His wing is bent the wrong way. His blood is red and abundant. It smells like brown butter. His hair is a mess, his face is in the sand. He doesn't know how much I love him. He's never really heard it.
I'd wake up every morning and tell myself . . .
"Simon . . . love . . . get up. We still have to save Agatha."
Simon is on the ground.
This will end in flames.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Wayward Son

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

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“The half-life of love is forever.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“You can't regret the life you didn't lead.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“You left me this mad girl, and I love her well. She is braver and wilder than any of my sons.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world
because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“She sealed his lips with a wanton kiss; 'Though I forgive your breaking your vows to heaven, I expect you to keep your vows to me.”
― Matthew Lewis, The Monk

“You are mine, and Heaven itself cannot rescue you from my power.”
― Matthew Lewis, The Monk

“Vice is ever most dangerous when lurking behind the Mask of Virtue.”
― Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk

“I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“LADY LAZARUS

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

-- written 23-29 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born. That’s why it’s called the world to come, because that’s where they make the new souls for the future. And the reward when good people die” – her mother paused, swallowed, paused again – “the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven’t been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have – they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it’s up to the new ones, once they’re born, what they’ll use and what they won’t, but that’s what everyone who dies is doing, I think. They get to decide what kind of people the new ones might be able to become.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“People have their fictions and believe what they have mutually agreed upon. But you know, it’s not necessarily true that things are only like this or that. It’s simply”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“For being human holds a special grief Of privacy within the universe That yearns and waits to be retouched By someone who can take away The memory of death.”
― Anonymous, Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative