Utopia > Utopia's Quotes

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession - celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, 'Hari, Hari! Hari Potter!'”
― Philip Reeve, Fever Crumb

“My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?'

He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you.

But he said, 'Because I feel sorry for you.'

'Why?'

'Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“Curiouser and curiouser!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Combat isn't where you might die -- though that does happen -- it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don't underestimate the power of that revelation. Don't underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“How slow life is, how violent hope is.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“People do not change, they are merely revealed.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“J'ai commencé ma vie comme je la finirai sans doute : au milieu des livres.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

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

“It's far better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone — so far.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.”
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

“Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Make me immortal with a kiss.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays

“Stephen kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.

Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest,
Robin’s lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin’s eyes
Haunts me night and day.”
― Sara Teasdale, The Collected Poems

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend