Andrew > Andrew's Quotes

“In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I felt a sudden rush of warmth in my body, and felt the tears well up once again. But I didn’t cry. It’s always better to drink than to cry.”
― Hiromi Kawakami, The Briefcase

“Maybe it was a cumulative process, like smoking cigarettes. One didn’t do much. Five didn’t do much more. Every emotion he’d shut down, every human contact he’d spurned, every love and friendship and moment of compassion from which he’d turned had taken him a degree away from himself.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea

“When you don’t know everything you could know, it’s a fine time to shut your fucking noisemaker and be polite.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It began as so many tales do: a severed hand was floating in a mountain river.”
― Brandish Gilhelm, The Shield of Hannar

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels