Deborah > Deborah's Quotes

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”
― Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires

“Prejudice is merely a consecration of stupidity.”
― Maurizio de Giovanni, The Crocodile

“You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work.”
― Sándor Márai, La mujer justa

“I don't like such "great questions" - my view is that life consists of a million little questions and that it is always only the totality of those that really matters.”
― Sándor Márai

“[U]nder even the most sincere human declarations there remained unarticulated layers of despair, fury, lies, and ignorance.”
― Sándor Márai

“The family is a vast project, so enormous and important, both for us personally and for the world at large, that it's worth putting up with all the incomprehensible cares of life, all that superfluous pain, for its sake.”
― Sándor Márai

“The deep secret at the core of art, in the artist himself, was the embodying of an instinct for play.”
― Sándor Márai

“It requires great spirit, an exceptionally great spirit, to suffer the success of a close relative.”
― Sándor Márai

“Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it.”
― Sándor Márai

“You can lead a horse to water but only very rarely can you drown him and get away with it.”
― Sue Perry, C.R.I.M.E. Science

“... cynicism is the only tool that can scrape away the tint off rose-coloured glasses.”
― Taona Dumisani Chiveneko, Sprout of Disruption

“He had the muscular definition of a man who had spent his life restraining elephants in heat.”
― Taona Dumisani Chiveneko, Sprout of Disruption

“[We] all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“He who seeks eternity should look at the sky, he who seeks the moment, should look at the cloud.”
― Mia Couto, The Tuner of Silences

“Love is a territory where orders can't be issued.”
― Mia Couto, The Tuner of Silences

“Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.”
― Chris Marker, La Jetée: ciné-roman

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Funny how being in opposition to something tends to inspire tireless picketing and cleverly worded signs, while support rarely arouses that level of productivity.”
― Fred Venturini, The Heart Does Not Grow Back

“But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.”
― Tim Parks

“We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained.”
― Alain de Botton, The News: A User's Manual

“What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North